As with many artists of the eighteenth century, biographical information on Francis Towne is patchy and inconclusive. Paul Oppe collected much material for his article of 1919, which, coinciding with the disposal of the remains of Towne's studio from Barton Place, near Exeter, ensured the artist's re- emergence following a century of neglect.' Forty years later Adrian Bury presented much the same information in a monograph,2 and a partly conjectural picture of Towne's life has evolved: born in Devon in 1739 or 1740, educated at William Shipley's drawing school in London and winner of a Society of Arts premium in 1759 before he returned to Exeter, where he remained between sketching tours to Wales in 1777, Italy and Switzerland in 1780-81 and Cumberland in 1786. New research now provides the following biographical details which overturn some received assumptions about the circumstances of Towne's life and work.

By the early 1820s the slow refashioning of the Bank of England was virtually complete, although the final thrust, the rebuilding of the last sections of the curtain wall, was finished only in 1827.John Soane's assorted array of public buildings at Westminster were by then also more or less finished - the Houses of Parliament and the Law Courts in 1824, the Board of Trade and Privy Council Offices in Whitehall, and related works in Downing Street a year or two later; only the New State Paper Office was yet to come.' In 1825, Soane, at the age of seventy-one, thought to commemorate his final achievements in the form of a publication. George Dance, had died in January that year, and Soane must have been all too aware that there was no volume to record his revered mentor's works.

Although the most conspicuous and costly state gifts sent to Spain by the Medici Grand Dukes consisted, on the whole, of carriages,' jewellery and rich textile hangings, various works of sculpture and painting also figured prominently.