IN THE GROUNDS of Cliveden House, a National Trust property in Buckinghamshire, is a little-known monumental bronze group of the Rape of Proserpina (Figs. 1-3). Brought to England from Rome by the 1st Viscount Astor in 1896, it has since then graced the parterre at the end of the formal garden behind the house, though neglected by visitors and art historians, who have concentrated on the collection of sarcophagi in front of the house and the marble statues on the balustrade below the terrace. Cliveden Hotel, which has recently restored the house and grounds to their former Edwardian splendour, has commissioned research into the large collection of paintings and sculpture there; these were gathered in the main by the 2nd Duke and Duchess of Sutherland during their occupancy between 1849 and 1869, and by the 1st Viscount Astor between 1893 and 1904, and are now dispersed around the interior of the house and grounds.

THE MONUMENT by Peter Scheemakers to Henry Petty, Ist Earl of Shelburne, at High Wycombe is among the largest and most costly monuments to have been erected in an English parish church in the eighteenth century (Fig.20). It is also one of the most elaborate representations of an aristocratic family on a monument from this period; but although it has long been recognised as one of Scheemakers's most ambitious works, the history of the commission and the formulation of the monument's imagery have received little attention. The recent identification of two alternative designs for the project - one by Taylor and another by Roubiliac - together with the survival of an unusually large amount of documentation now allow the circumstances in which the monument was produced to be reconstructed and questions about its function and range of meanings to be raised.

THE recent discovery of Roubiliac's terracotta model for the monument to the Earl of Shelburne (Fig.23) and the conservation of it undertaken for the Royal Museum of Scotland have made it possible to compare its technical features with those of the signed terracotta for the monument to the Duke ofArgyll (Fig.25). This has also been the subject of detailed investigative conservation. The similarities of technique and construction employed for both support the attribution of the Shelburne model to Roubiliac and provide new evidence about his technical procedures.

CELEBRATION of the military glories of the Napoleonic period raised fewer problems in mid-nineteenth century Britain than in France, where the Napoleonic legend had explosive dynastic implications. The continuation of work on the Emperor's mausoleum at the Invalides through three consecutive regimes, and the project's inception in the politically uncertain atmosphere of the latter days of the July Monarchy, combined to make this one of the century's more troubled decorative schemes. Of the many sculptors involved in it, Carlo Marochetti was to suffer the most from the constant revisions to the scheme. Although he was compensated for losing the tomb commission itself (Fig.30) by receiving another for an equestrian statue of the Emperor, repeated disagreements over characterisation and siting ensued, and the order for the statue was finally countermanded. While the substantial dossier in the Archives Nationales devoted to the wrangles over this statue contains  no reference to the matter,1 it is probable that Marochetti in part provoked these difficulties himself by simultaneously giving his attention to another equestrian statue, that of the Dukeof Wellington (Figs.38 and 39), which was inaugurated in Glasgow in October 1844. The Glaswegians used less tact than their French counterparts. It was openly asked whether it was acceptable for Marochetti to work concurrently on the two monuments, and this was only one of the questions raised. The Wellington commission, as we shall see, was not free from intrigue and polemic. In retrospect, however, these may have appeared to Marochetti anodyne enough compared to the labour-intensive concept shuffling over the Napoleon monument, for in 1849 he decided to settle in Britain.