The offices of The Burlington Magazine occupy two adjoining corner houses, the façade facing Duke’s Road, the side windows looking onto Woburn Walk, just south of Euston Road. They are part of an unusually elegant L-shaped speculative development of three-storey terraced houses with integral shops, created on the edge of the Duke of Bedford’s Bloomsbury estate by the pioneering builder–speculator Thomas Cubitt in 1822–25. They have miraculously survived much local redevelopment as well as bombing in the Second World War which prompted the investigation by the Survey of London of the surviving fabric of the area.
As one would expect of the British Library, London, the exhibition Mughal India: Art Culture and Empire (to 2nd April) is very bookish and rich in documents, although there are also plenty of wonderful pictures. It covers the whole period of Mughal rule, starting with a document: a manuscript grant of land by Babur, the energetic founder of the Empire, dated 1527. It ends in 1858, with a photograph of the tragic last Mughal Emperor, Bhahadur Shah II, on his sickbed, awaiting trial for assisting the ‘Mutiny’, just before being exiled by the British to Burma.
New documentation on the monument (1777–82) to Mary, 3rd Duchess of Montagu, by Peter Mathias Van Gelder, and his work on Roubiliac’s Montagu monuments, all in St Edmund’s Church, Warkton, Northamptonshire.
The early use of the word ‘Baroque’ in England.
More on Gainsborough’s Blue Boy (1769–70; Huntington Library Art Collections, San Marino CA), who is here identified as Gainsborough Dupont.
New information on Thomas Gainsborough’s Elizabeth Sheridan, Mrs Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1785–87; National Gallery of Art, Washington), following recent X-radiograph examination.
The large battle painting Destruction of the floating batteries before Gibraltar (c.1783; Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario), formally given to Benjamin West, is here reattributed to his son, Raphael West.
An earlier portrait is revealed through X-radiography beneath that of Joseph Henry by Sir Thomas Lawrence (c.1805; Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Houston).
New information on the house in Brighton rented by John Constable.
Three new additions to the catalogue raisonné on Walter Sickert.