The Paris views of Charles Meryon have appealed to print connoisseurs since they first appeared in the 1850s. Among their earliest admirers were Charles Baudelaire, who wished to contribute to a never-realised collaborative edition of Eaux- Fortes sur Paris, Felix Bracquemond, who etched a portrait of Meryon which was included in the series (Fig. 10), and Philippe Burty, who compiled the first catalogue raisonne of Meryon's etchings.2 This admiration has seldom waned, and the prints have remained popular not simply for their record of Paris before the transformations effected by Baron Haussmann or their technical brilliance, but also for their romantic, slightly sinister, portrayal of medieval sites as filtered through Meryon's individual and tortured sensibility. The nature of that sensibility, and a possible autobiographical content to the images, are the subjects of this article.

Begun in the autumn of 1905, Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein (Fig. 11) was the result of eighty or more separate sittings. In April 1906 Picasso painted out the whole head, and soon after both painter and sitter (Fig.12, seen here in a photograph taken five years earlier) left Paris.' When Picasso returned from Gosol in mid-August, he completed the painting in the absence of his model. Both Picasso and Stein were pleased with the results, as she records in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas: And when she saw it he and she were content'. Stein's well-known account has given rise to much speculationabout the creative process that led to the final painting. Questions have arisen about the appearance of the initial sketch, the changes or difficulties that might explain the many sittings needed to complete the work, and the stylistic influences that lay behind the creation of the face. The handling of Stein's compelling image betrays an uneasy mixture of two different styles: within this discrepancy, and in particular, in the handling of her face, lies the future direction of Picasso's art.

Paul Nash painted Landscape at Iden (Fig.25) in 1929, a year in which his sense of mortality had been heightened by his father's death in February.' In this article I suggest, on the basis of the literary and critical influences informing Nash's work, that Landscape at Iden should be grouped with the several works linked to the theme of death which Nash produced that year.