ALTHOUGH Francis Lapiere is known as one of the grandest and most accomplished upholsterers working in late seventeenth-century England, a supplier of magnificent state beds such as that now partly surviving at Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire (Fig. 1), little is known of his career and much of the published information is inaccurate.* In the first edition of Percy Macquoid and Ralph Edwards's Dictionary of English Furniture published in 1927, the short entry on 'Francis La Pierre' states that this French upholsterer supplied carpets and beds to the Great Wardrobe (charged with furnishing the royal palaces) between 1690 and 1696, and similar items for William Cavendish, first Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth, including a bed recorded in an account book entry of September 1697 ('in part of ?470 for a Bed payable at ?6 a week - 17 paymts, paid ?102'). Finally it is stated, on the basis of an entry in the Calendar of Treasury Papers, that 'La Pierre' was 'prosecuted as an alien enemy' in 1697. This account was repeated in the second edition of the Dictionary (1954), and it has been assumed that Lapiere was a Huguenot. In the list of London furniture makers issued the previous year by Sir Ambrose Heal, Lapiere's year of death is given as 1717. All these errors - Lapiere's Huguenot connexion, his imprisonment and date of death - reappear in the Dictionary of English Furniture Makers published in 1986. It is the purpose of the present article to reassess Lapiere's career in the light of new documents discovered at the Public Record Office in the course of our research on the organisation and activities of the Great Wardrobe in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The discovery of Lapiere's Will, an inventory of his possessions, and details of his involvement in a Chancery suit, allow much of the record to be put straight.

published in 1986. It is the purpose of the present article to reassess Lapiere's career in the light of new documents discovered at the Public Record Office in the course of our research on the organisation and activities of the Great Wardrobe in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The discovery of Lapiere's Will, an inventory of his possessions, and details of his involvement in a Chancery suit, allow much of the record to be put straight.

THE early building-history of the third Earl of Burlington's Chiswick House (Fig.5) has hitherto been obscured by the paucity of documentary sources to supplement the rich visual evidence of the paintings of Jacques Rigaud and Pieter Andreas Rysbrack (Figs.6 and 7) and the surviving splendour of the house itself.* A modicum of contemporary comment, dates on overmantels on the upper floor, and a few entries for Chiswick in Andrew Crotty's accounts for Burlington House, in London, from 1726 to 1731 have provided scant support for scholarly speculation about the house's development. All the more welcome, therefore, is the discovery of two of the accounts for Chiswick kept by Henry Simpson, whom the Earl appointed as his agent and receiver for all his estates in Great Britain on 8th October 1725, and as his steward on 2nd April 1726.

THE household accounts of Katherine Manners, Duchess of Buckingham (d. 1649), contain an informative document which has not previously been noticed.* It refers to the Duchess's employment of the French sculptor Hubert Le Sueur to make a funerary monument for her and her late husband in Westminster Abbey, and identifies his collaborator.

ONE of the most striking works of the eighteenth century
associated with a British woman artist is a portrait (Fig.13), now in the Royal College of Physicians, of the eccentric Augustan physician and wit, Dr Messenger Monsey (1694-1788).

associated with a British woman artist is a portrait (Fig.13), now in the Royal College of Physicians, of the eccentric Augustan physician and wit, Dr Messenger Monsey (1694-1788).

THE career of the previously little-known artist Giovanni Battista Lusieri, known as Don Tito or Titta Lusier, was discussed by C.I.M. Williams in this Magazine in 1982. Since then the large and highly finished water-colour views of Naples and other sites in Italy which Lusieri produced mainly for English Grand Tourists in the 1780s and 1790s have enjoyed a surge of popularity, largely promoted by the sale, in 1986, of some twenty works from the collection of the Earl of Elgin, whose ancestor had been a major patron of Lusieri and had taken the artist to Greece in 1799.

WHILE returning from his annual Italian visit, Henry Layard (Fig.21) stopped in Bologna on 25th September 1856, from where he wrote to John Murray about his new found enthusiasm for Ferrarese painting: 'The Gallery of the Marchese Costabili contains a most interesting series of Ferrarese masters - quite unique. Many painters of a high order of merit are to be met with in Ferrara - Ercole Grandi, Panetti, Tura- to say nothing of Garofalo- who in some pictures takes a very high position . . . the Costas delight me. Fancy Sir Joshua Reynolds neglecting them for those wretches the Carracci'. A decade later, Layard who had a genius for understanding Quattrocento art, eventually bought some twenty-two paintings from the Costabili collection, both for himself and for the collection of Sir Ivor Guest (later the Ist Lord Wimborne) at Canford Manor, Dorset. In fairness to Reynolds, it should be pointed out that it would have been difficult for him to have acquired a knowledge of Ferrarese painting in the early 1750s when he visited Emilia, for there was then no major monument nor any accessible collection of Ferrarese primitives.

FRANCESCO ALGAROTTI's contribution to the fast growth of the Dresden Gallery has been generally acknowledged, whereas Giovanni Ludovico Bianconi's rôle has passed relatively unnoticed outside the narrow domain of Bolognese local history. Three unpublished letters by Ignazio Hugford and some notes by Carlo Cesare Giovannini (one of Bianconi's aids in picture-hunting) shed a new light on this branch of his activity in Germany, as well as on the history of a group of paintings rejected by Dresden, but traceable in present-day Northern European and American private and public collections.

A MIASMA of confusion and error pervades the literature on two important paintings which were long housed in S. Maria presso S. Celso, one of the most prestigious churches in Milan: a Holy Family now in Vienna, attributed for centuries to Raphael (Fig.40) and a version, now in Los Angeles, of Leonardo's St Anne, thought to be by Salaì (Fig.39). A glance at the sources is sufficent to reconstruct the history of the two paintings.

, thought to be by Salaì (Fig.39). A glance at the sources is sufficent to reconstruct the history of the two paintings.