‘I’VE FINISHED the General’s animal picture’, Delacroix wrote to his friend Charles-Raymond Soulier on 28th September 1827, ‘and I’ve dug up a rococo frame which I am having regilded and which will do wonderfully. It has already struck the fancy of a store of collectors and I think that it will be amusing at the Salon’. As Delacroix here suggests, the Still life with lobsters (Fig.5) is a very curious painting. While lobsters sometimes figure in still-life painting, usually on a table with game or fruit, Delacroix’s picture is very different. Two enormous cooked lobsters lie in the foreground of a distant landscape depicting a hunting scene; the lobsters are surrounded by a pheasant, a jay and a hare, a hunting rifle, a tasselled mesh game-bag and a Scottish plaid; a lone (live) lizard occupies the foreground; the perspective is from high up, looking out over the countryside. The picture makes little narrative or iconographical sense: although one may, as others have done, invoke a ‘British’ theme in the hunters, arms and plaid, the prominent lobsters are wholly incongruous with these other elements. The brilliantly coloured still life boldly set against the deeply recessive landscape is consistent with Delacroix’s reliance in this period – one that also produced the Death of Sardanapalus – on ‘romantic’ theatricality and flourish. Yet despite its prominence in the Louvre since 1934, and the near-universal admiration it has gained, the still life remains one of the painter’s least studied works, its idiosyncrasies largely ignored, its intended strangeness unaccounted for, its origins and inspiration unexplained. Scholars who have commented on the oddity of the lobsters, at least, have seen them either as allusions to still-life precedents or as a sly comment on the conservative politics of the man for whom the picture was painted, through an association of the lobster with the backward-moving crayfish.

THE BRILLIANT AND IDIOSYNCRATIC Florentine artist Piero di Cosimo already had a place in the Victorian imagination by the 1860s. His painting commonly known as the Death of Procris (Fig.31) was acquired in 1862 by Sir Charles Eastlake from Lombardi in Florence, and it is relevant to what follows that the National Gallery owned so early on the artist’s most lyrical and affecting mythological picture. That and the following year saw the publication in several parts of George Eliot’s Romola, in which Piero di Cosimo is a key character: in her novel the eccentric misanthrope portrayed in Vasari’s Lives is endowed with insights into human character to match his artistic invention. But if Piero di Cosimo’s name was already one to conjure with, his œuvre still remained to be reconstructed. It has even been argued that Eliot selected this artist not only for his character as depicted by Vasari, but also for the convenient dearth of known works, which made it possible for her to invent ‘prophetic pictures’ by him to point up the morality of her narrative. When Crowe and Cavalcaselle tacked an account of Piero di Cosimo on to the end of the chapter on Lorenzo di Credi in their New History of Italian Art, they listed only four of the paintings now accepted: the Incarnation and the Liberation of Andromeda in the Uffizi, the Mars and Venus in Berlin and the Death of Procris in London. The key figure for the rediscovery of the artist was Giovanni Morelli’s pupil Gustavo Frizzoni, who made a series of brilliant attributions of paintings in Berlin, London, The Hague, Rome and Paris between 1870 and 1906. The first monographic studies on the artist were published in Germany in the last years of the nineteenth century.

NIKOLAUS PEVSNER, who was born in Leipzig, Saxony, came from a family of haute bourgeoisie Jewish merchants of Russian origin. Pevsner himself renounced his Jewish roots and became at the age of nineteen a convert to Evangelical Lutheranism. His academic training was carried out at the universities of Leipzig, Munich (under Heinrich Wölfflin), Berlin (under Adolf Goldschmidt) and in Frankfurt am Main, where he studied with Rudolf Kautzsch. For his doctorate he returned to Leipzig to be supervised by the influential Wilhelm Pinder and wrote his thesis, Leipziger Barock, Die Baukunst der Barockzeit in Leipzig (Baroque Merchant Houses of Leipzig), published in Dresden in 1929; in the previous year he had published a study of Italian Mannerist and Baroque painting, Die italienische Malerei vom Ende der Renaissance bis zum ausgehenden Rokoko. From 1925 to 1928 he was an unpaid assistant keeper in the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden and then took up a post in 1928 as lecturer in the history of art and architecture at the University of Göttingen. It was here that he became particularly interested in English art, design and architecture and in 1930, like Karl Friedrich Schinkel before him, he travelled extensively in England to learn by observation on the ground. This relatively unusual specialisation in English art was encouraged by Professor Hans Hecht at Göttingen’s English Department, who sent Pevsner to collect material in England for a course of lectures on English art.