THE PAINTINGS OF Henley-on-Thames by Jan Siberechts have emerged piecemeal from the shadows over the past sixty years, but each new addition, rather than helping to explain who commissioned the sequence and why, has only added to the puzzle. In 2001 the purchase by the River & Rowing Museum in Henley-on-Thames of one of these canvases, Henley from the Wargrave Road II (Fig.1), prompted new research into their origins. Five other paintings can now be added to the series: Landscape with rainbow (Fig.2); Henley from the Wargrave Road I (Fig.3); A prospect of the Thames near Henley (Fig.4); Landscape with a view of Henley-on-Thames (Fig.5); and An extensive river landscape (Fig.6). Several other views possibly associated with the series are still being investigated.

THE CONSTRUCTION OF Sir Robert Smirke’s new County Building on the banks of the Tay in Perth provided the opportunity for civic dignitaries to commission three full-length portraits. Contemporary newspaper reports and manuscript records, published here for the first time, furnish detailed accounts of negotiations with Lawrence and throw further light on his studio practice.

JOHN BRETT PAINTED in the Alps in the summers of 1856 and 1858. The two principal works that derived from these trips, The Glacier of Rosenlaui (Fig.20), from the first, and Val d’Aosta (Fig.21), from the second, are essentially concerned with the process of glaciation, both actual and as evident in the landscape. Brett was a man of science and highly intelligent – indeed, he was described by Ruskin in 1860 as ‘one of my keenest-minded friends’. Furthermore, he was a man prepared to express himself forcefully, as witnessed by Ruskin’s response in 1865 to the disagreement with Brett that had led to their final break: ‘I will associate with no man who does not more or less accept my own estimate of myself. For instance, Brett told me, a year ago, that a statement of mine respecting a scientific matter (which I knew à fond before he was born) was “bosh”. I told him in return he was a fool; he left the house, and I will not see him again “until he is wiser”’. Whatever Ruskin’s view of Brett’s claim to be taken seriously as a scientist, Brett’s later published observations were respected within the scientific community.

WHEN PAULE VEZELAY (1892–1984; Fig.29) founded Groupe Espace in London in 1953, she became the first British artist ever to establish an art group in Britain as a formally constituted subsidiary of a European art movement, although this unusual episode has not so far featured in British art-historical literature. Groupe Espace differed from the informality of most British art groups by following the more common continental practice of adopting a formal constitution. It is also the only group in Britain to have overtly promoted the Constructivist concept of a synthesis of architecture and abstract painting and sculpture in the creation of an ideal society. If its ambitions ran far ahead of its achievements, this was due as much to its identification with Paris, at a time when the focus of influence was swinging towards New York, as it was to the personal antagonism which Vézelay experienced from some prominent figures in the British art world.

IN THE AUTUMN of 1647 the young Peter Lely painted a portrait of Charles I and his fourteen-year-old second son, James, Duke of York (Fig.36). Both at the time were effectively captives. At the beginning of the year the intransigent king had been surrendered into the custody of Parliament by the Scots at Newcastle, where he had fled from the beleaguered royalist capital of Oxford. Removed by a coup of junior army officers from Holdenby, he was then at Hampton Court. It was ‘one of his own houses’ certainly, but he was still a prisoner of the army, which was then also at loggerheads with the Parliament that employed it. The Duke of York was lodged a few miles downriver at Syon House, the home of his governor, Algernon Percy, 10th Earl of Northumberland. He had joined his younger brother and sister in Northumberland’s custody at St James’s Palace when Oxford surrendered to the forces of Parliament. On an outbreak of plague in London, Northumberland removed the royal children to his own house for the summer, but with the instruction from Parliament not to let suspect royalists have access to them. They were, however, allowed to visit their father and he them.

A LETTER DISCOVERED in the Goodwood Archives at the West Sussex Record Office in Chichester reveals how Canaletto made some of his London contacts and, in particular, how two of his magnificent views of London came to be at Nelahozeves, a castle near Prague belonging to the Lobkowicz family. It is a letter of introduction for Ferdinand Philip, 6th Prince Lobkowicz (1724–84) to meet Charles Lennox, 2nd Duke of Richmond (1701–50). It confirms Francis Russell’s surmise that Richmond, Canaletto’s first London patron, provided the painter with further contacts (see Appendix below).

IN THE JULY 2005 issue of this Magazine, Stephen Lloyd argued that the famous painting in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, of the Revd Robert Walker in a skating pose (Fig.40) is not in fact by Sir Henry Raeburn but by the French artist Henri-Pierre Danloux. I believe this re-attribution to be mistaken, based on an inadequate analysis of the stylistic characteristics of the two painters and on a method that leans too heavily on the more obvious ‘narrative’ elements of the picture – what Giovanni Morelli, more than a hundred years ago, termed ‘the general impression’, in essence, the image.

IN THE 1880s Edward Burne-Jones (Fig.51) received numerous honours, including the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law at the University of Oxford (1881) and, together with William Morris, honorary fellowship of their alma mater, Exeter College, Oxford (1883). This was followed by Burne-Jones’s election to associate membership of the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in June 1885. The news came as a complete surprise to the artist, while his wife, Georgiana, initially believed that it was a trick.