OWING TO THE efforts of various artists, we have known for some time what the Great Room on the top floor of the northern block of Somerset House looked like when it was used to display the most prestigious works in the annual exhibitions of the Royal Academy in 1784, 1787, 1788, 1808 and 1828. We also possess diagrams by Edward Francis Burney and Thomas Sandby that fix the precise location of the majority of works hung within the Great Room during the 1784 and 1792 exhibitions respectively.

WILLIAM SCOTT DID little to encourage interest in the pictures he painted during the Second World War. His dismissal of what turns out to be a sizeable body of work began almost immediately, to judge from the brief biographical note (which he must have supplied) included in the catalogue of the 1947–48 British Council touring exhibition Modern British Paintings 1942–47: ‘He [Scott] served in the army for nearly four years during which time painting practically ceased’. When Alan Bowness published his monograph on Scott in 1964, he omitted the war paintings and also left them out of the retrospective exhibition he organised for the Tate Gallery in 1972. This was understandable as the purpose of both the monograph and the exhibition was to chart Scott’s progress from figuration to abstraction and his subsequent development of a style that combined, as Bowness observed, ‘the architectural purity of the abstract paintings with the rich associations of the still lifes’. The War years would have distracted from the coherence of this narrative. Scott said as much when he wrote in the catalogue for the Tate show: ‘While in the army I painted some watercolour landscapes, but felt that these paintings, done in very difficult conditions, were not really a continuation of what I had started in Brittany. I was caught up in the wave of the English watercolour nationalist romantic patriotic isolationist self-preservationist movement’.

EDUARDO PAOLOZZI'S SERIES of forty-five Bunk collages, made by the artist in Paris and London from around 1947 to 1952, are often considered as prototypical works of Pop art. Evadne in green dimension (Fig.22), from which the series derives its title, is typical in its presentation of consumer goods, sex symbols and richly toned food advertisements, all cut from American magazines and combined in a dynamic composition. In contrast to other collages made by Paolozzi around the same time, which refer back to a pre-War Surrealist aesthetic, particularly that of Kurt Schwitters or of Max Ernst, the Bunk collages form a different category, using up-to-date colour magazine and advertising imagery, and presenting this material in a direct, non-pictorial format. However, many of the works in the series are characterised by the crudeness with which the source material has been cut and pasted down, incorporating yellowing strips of Sellotape and affixed to sheets of card that appear recycled from previous collages (Figs.23 and 24). This makeshift quality raises the question of whether the collages were intended as works of art for display or whether they were private working material, along the lines of those collages found in the numerous scrapbooks kept by Paolozzi during the same period. Several of the series are not really collages, but single ‘tearsheets’ pasted down (Figs.25 and 26). The various locations in which the Bunk collages can be found further enhance the ambiguity of their material status. Where some are kept as works of art in a museum store (Tate, London), others are held in Prints and Drawings collections (Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh) and still others are stored as archival material (Art and Design Archive, Victoria and Albert Museum). Aside from several works held in private collections, the location of about fifteen of the collages remains so far unidentified (it must be assumed) within Paolozzi’s personal archive. It is at least in part due to this fugitive status that a certain amount of myth has gathered around the Bunk series, not least concerning their prophetic stature. New research, presented in this article, examines the construction of this myth, particularly in the light of Paolozzi’s retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1971, and the print series that was made from the collages shortly thereafter. It is through this print series that the Bunk collages are now commonly known, and most often displayed and illustrated. In addition, some of the source material used in the collages is examined, revealing a broader field of reference than the American magazines that became so attractive to Pop artists around the mid-1950s.

SINCE 'THE NATURE of drawing as evidence’ in relation to St Paul’s Cathedral has featured twice in the pages of this Magazine, it would be appropriate to revisit it here in the context of Andrew Geraghty’s new catalogue of Christopher Wren’s drawings held at All Souls, Oxford, reviewed in this issue by the present writer (p.261).

BETWEEN 1876 AND 1887, when William Holman Hunt was working on The triumph of the innocents (Fig.50), he painted The bride of Bethlehem (1879–84; Fig.51), which is preparatory to the larger work. Its subject is the Virgin Mary in bridal dress, thus dating it to the time of the birth of Christ. He also drew a Study for a picture from a Bethlehem woman (Study for the Virgin in ‘The triumph of the innocents’), which is inscribed at lower left ‘Nijimi. a Bethlehemite’ and dated 11th August 1877 (Fig.49). Of particular interest is that the artist used ancient Jewish coins as models for the coins in the women’s jewellery. In The triumph of the innocents, the Virgin Mary also wears a head-dress of coins.

IN 1893 the YOUNG Walter Sickert travelled to Blackheath, south London, to draw Sir John Gilbert (1817–97), the famously reclusive Victorian painter and illustrator. The occasion greatly moved Sickert, and forty years later he remembered, ‘to my very great delight, he [Gilbert] was even kind enough to retouch the drawing, which was published in the Pall Mall Gazette. This gives me a right to boast that I have once collaborated with Gilbert’. While many artists would have been reluctant to make such an admission let alone boast about it, Sickert, with typical gusto and flamboyance, later used this early ‘collaboration’ as the inspiration for a series of paintings.

JOHN GRAHAM POLLARD, who died on 17th December 2007, was born in Gillingham, Kent, in 1929; his father was a naval man based at Chatham. From an early age Graham took an interest in art, literature and science. After the Second World War the family moved to Cambridge where his father worked at Pembroke College. Within weeks Graham was seen so frequently in the Fitzwilliam Museum that he was offered a job there as an attendant. This was the beginning of a career that spanned some forty-one years. His external degree in geography was intended to be taken at London University, but national service put a stop to that in 1948. Two years later, his service completed, Graham was offered the post of Museum Assistant at the Fitzwilliam and assigned to the Coin Room under Harold Shrubbs. At the time the Museum’s Director, Carl Winter, encouraged Graham to apply to Cambridge University to read history, and he entered Pembroke College in 1951. During his studies he continued to work in the Museum. In 1954 he graduated and was appointed Junior Assistant Keeper, and in 1966 Keeper of Coins and Medals. Three years later he became Deputy Director.