A FEW YEARS ago I published an essay in Art and Antiques on 'Winslow Homer's Mystery Woman', in which I speculated about Homer's relationship with a red-haired woman who appears in a number of his paintings and water-colours of the 1870s. Since the article appeared, information has come to light which demonstrates that most of my con- jectures were incorrect. It is worth recapitulating the 'mystery woman' theory before indicating just where I went astray.

A TINY sketch of 1879 (Fig.18)' is the first witness to the spatial and compositional preoccupations that were to dominate Degas's classroom pictures for almost two dec- ades. Degas produced some forty pictures in an elongated, frieze-like format: some of them are race-course scenes, but most show ballet dancers in a classroom setting. The ballet friezes may themselves be divided into two groups. Some, which we shall call the rightward friezes, start from a shallow foreground on the left, backed by a wall receding steeply towards the right; further to the right, this wall has a setback that widens the room (Figs. 17, 21, 22, 23, 24 and 33).2 The leftward friezes have a similar but reversed compo- sition: they depict an L-shaped space that opens out from the shallow lower right to a widened background on the left - the gain in width offsetting the narrowing perspective (Figs.25, 32 and 34).