THE ROMANO-BYZANTINE CHAPEL created by Louis Com-fort Tiffany for the Columbian World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893 (Fig.37) was a remarkable event in the development of American decorative art. Many commentators have pointed to its centrality in Tiffany’s œuvre, yet, like much of what he did, it was a strangely ambivalent enterprise. On the one hand it rivalled the ecclesiastical achievements of the Middle Ages and generated in many visitors a mood of religious awe, yet on the other hand it was a dramatic piece of showmanship produced for a setting, the famous ‘White City’, that was entirely secular. Such was the breadth of the chapel’s appeal, however, that the style, or elements of it, were widely adopted across America in the religious buildings of Protestants, Catholics and Jews, and incorporated into institutions, department stores and private homes.

VISITING MELSETTER HOUSE on the island of Hoy in Orkney in August 1902, May Morris wrote to a friend:
The first thing that greets one’s eye in the hall is a replica of the Ship from the King Arthur Tapestry, and very noble and beautiful it looks. Then in the drawing-room hangs the Shields in the Wood, all sparkling with colour. Hammersmith carpets on the floor, and Mother’s embroidery hanging by one window, looking delightfully delicate and suitable.

THE RECENT EXTENSIVE restoration of stuccos by Giacomo Serpotta (1656–1732) and his school in Palermo, undertaken by the Regione Siciliana, gave the present writer the opportunity of observing works from the vantage point of the scaffolding and confirmed his earlier opinions on the attribution of several questionable decorations to lesser members of the Serpotta family. More important, scrutiny of the nave and chancel of the church of the Assunta, possibly executed by Giacomo’s brother Giuseppe (1653–1719) and his son Procopio (1679–1755) during the first quarter of the eighteenth century, has helped to clarify the roles the various members of the family played in the realisation of the elaborate stucco interior of the church of S. Spirito in Agrigento which, as recently discovered documents show, was planned by Giacomo Serpotta (Fig.1).

THE 1833 INVENTORY of Browsholme Hall, then in Yorkshire, now in Lancashire, lists in its library: a ‘Circular Pier Glass in rich carved and gilt frame and lion head suspender’ (Fig.20) and a ‘Splendid Pier table, imitation Marble Top frame of Vine wreaths supported on branches with young Bacchus riding on a goat and two children all finely carved in wood’ (Fig.21); and, in the next-door drawing room, a ‘Richly Carved and gilt Chandelier for six lights’ (Fig.25). All three pieces were illustrated in watercolours of interiors at Browsholme executed in about 1815 by John Chessell Buckler (1793–1894) for Thomas Lister Parker (1779–1858), then the owner of Browsholme Hall. The table is shown in the dining room, where it still stands (Fig.22), the chandelier in the drawing room, where it still hangs (Fig.24), and the pier-glass in the library (Fig.19), from where it has since been moved to the drawing room.

ALTHOUGH WORKING DRAWINGS – portraturae or plats as they were commonly known – of architecture and furnishings are frequently referred to in English medieval documents, surviving examples are sufficiently rare to make each new discovery worth advertising. This article introduces a hitherto unpublished example datable to the later fourteenth century: a design preserved in Hereford Cathedral Library in MS.P.1.9 for a single-register retable (Fig.50). There is apparently no other working drawing for an English medieval altarpiece of this once common type in existence. This example thus possesses an important place in the documentary history of the English medieval altarpiece.

THE WELL-KNOWN taste in Britain for eighteenth-century soft-paste Sèvres porcelain is copiously documented, ranging from contemporary collectors in the eighteenth century to the millionaire enthusiasts of the nineteenth, when connoisseurs such as the Prince Regent and the 4th Marquess of Hertford were prepared to pay huge prices for imposing specimens, especially large display vases. Conversely, the British seem to have had less interest in the purchase of new items of Sèvres porcelain in the nineteenth century, when both the hard-paste body and the neo-mannerist French shapes were perhaps less appealing to them. Several important pieces were bought by the South Kensington Museum as examples of modern decorative design and manufacture, and a number of fine pieces were presented to individuals and national institutions by the French Government, a key aspect of government policy.