SOME seven years ago Benedict Nicholson and Keith Roberts first told me of their idea of this series of annual lectures each devoted to the discussion of a single portrait. After the bereavement which THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE suffered through the sudden death of Benedict Nicholson, it was Keith Roberts who invited me to give this lecture and even agreed to bend the rules slightly to accommodate a portrait trailing a large question-mark behind it. It is characteristic of the kind of friend he was that he immediately took a lively interest - only a few weeks before his sad and unexpected death he brought me the catalogue of an exhibition which, as he rightly thought, would come in useful for me, the exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery of works by Tom Phillips. 

ONE of the oldest, and at the same time, best quality works of the Italian Trecento in Czechoslovakia is a small tabernacle in the Moravian Gallery in Brno, which has never been published. The small work was given to the Picture Gallery of the former Regional Museum just before the end of the last century by Count J. J. Liechtenstein. Thanks to this art-loving patron, the Brno Museum acquired several other valuable Italian paintings, to which attention was drawn, some time ago, in an article by W. Suida. 

William Blundell Spence, painter, author, collector and marchand amateur, was a contemporary and life-long friend of Sir James Hudson and Sir Henry Layard though he belonged, mentally to an earlier generation of Anglo-Italians. Spence was largely brought up in Italy - in the Italuy of Stendhol's La Chartreuse de Parme - and he remained attached by many personal ties to that fancy-dress world of small royal counts even after it had all vanished into limbo in 1860. So he was already something of an anachronism by the time Hudson and Layard settled in Italy on their retirement: and when he dies in 1900 Spence was remembered mainly as a picturesque local survival.