An examination of Horatio Walpole’s collecting in the 1830s and 1840s, particularly of early Italian paintings, using unpublished correspondence with his agent Dennistoun.

The discovery of the head of a bearded man in profile visible in the clouds in The death of St Francis of Assisi (c.1288–92) in the fresco cycle in the Upper Church of the Basilica of S. Francesco, Assisi.

Gerard Dou’s The tooth puller (c.1630–35), now in the Louvre, is identified as having been part of the ‘Dutch Gift’ to Charles II.

An examination of a little-known altarpiece of the Purification of the Virgin (1672–73) by Francesco Cozza.

The failed negotiations by Louis XV to purchase Peter Paul Rubens’s Rape of the Sabines (c.1627–28) and Anthony Van Dyck’s Charity (c.1635–40).

Further information on the collecting of John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, in Venice.

More details on the appearance in 1922 of Caravaggio’s Taking of Christ in salerooms in Edinburgh.

Unpublished correspondence between Gertrud Bing and Kenneth Clark on the latter’s The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956).

A re-examination by Mariët Westermann of Svetlana Alpers’s The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (1983).