FEW PICTURES HAVE been the focus of as much confused – and confusing – attention as Leonardo da Vinci’s two versions of the Virgin and Child with the infant St John and an angel, commonly known as the Virgin of the rocks, at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, and the National Gallery, London (Figs.1 and 2). Generations of art historians have wrestled with conflicting explanations of these pictures’ histories, their mutual relationship and, in particular, the status and ‘authenticity’ of the London painting. The recent discovery of two distinct compositional underdrawings, seen using infra-red reflectography, under the surface of the National Gallery’s Virgin of the rocks, may clarify some of these problems (Fig.3). The first of these (here called Composition A; Fig.4) bears no correspondence at all to the image that we know today, and X-radiography shows that none of it was ever painted. The second underdrawing (Composition B; Fig.5) is for the Virgin of the rocks as it was finally executed, but even here there is evidence of several substantial changes of mind and of a complicated working procedure. Before analysing these remarkable underdrawings, it is worth summarising the known facts relating to this famously troubled commission.

AS GOVERNOR-GENERAL of the Austrian Netherlands, Charles-Alexandre, Duke of Lorraine (1712–80), turned his attention to a bewildering variety of activities, from collecting books and pictures to experimenting in science and alchemy, from inventing all sorts of technical innovations to founding manufactories for the production of porcelain, wallpaper, textiles, copper and gold wire and many other goods. Building was a lifelong passion; the prince was involved in the design of new edifices such as the Château Charles near Tervuren, erected towards the end of his life, and his overriding interest appears to have been the creation of beautifully appointed interiors. His principal, or winter, apartment on the first floor of the palace in Brussels was installed around 1750 and almost entirely refurbished in the late 1750s and early 1760s, after which he continued to add costly works of art to its various rooms. And yet, after having subsequently given his attention to other rooms in the palace, he returned to the winter apartment and decided to largely redecorate it in the early 1770s. The Rococo style of the rooms that had been finished just over ten years earlier doubtless seemed old-fashioned, inspiring the prince to commission interiors in the Neo-classical style, of which his court architect, Laurent-Benoît Dewez (1731–1812), was a confirmed advocate. But Charles of Lorraine was surely also motivated by his incessant quest for the novel, the unprecedented, the marvellous and the grandiose. In this article the genesis and appearance of the new Audience Chamber, the most remarkable interior created as part of the 1770s campaign, is presented on the basis of new archival material, and it is proposed that the large writing-table made for this room can be identified with the famous so-called Abercorn desk at the Wallace Collection, London.

SINCE ITS ACQUISITION by the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, in 1949, the Skating minister (Fig.28), a portrait of the Revd Robert Walker, D.D. (1755–1808), has inexorably become the most popular work of art in that collection. Perceived not only as the most famous work by Henry Raeburn, but also as one of the best-known Scottish paintings, the Skating minister has recently been considered a quintessential picture from the ‘golden age’ of British art. However, the circumstances surrounding the commissioning of the painting are unknown, and there is no record of this work in the art-historical literature or in biographical material relating to Walker before the twentieth century. After its emergence in 1902 from complete obscurity, the work was rejected in 1914 as a painting by Raeburn by one of the leading authorities on the artist, James Greig. During the 1970s and 1980s, curators at the National Gallery of Scotland expressed doubts about the authorship of the picture, and over the last decade an increasing number of art historians and critics have voiced reservations over the attribution to Raeburn. Nonetheless, until recently no one has publicly proposed any alternative candidate for the artist behind this puzzling but much-loved image. This article proposes as the author of the work one of the most versatile portraitists practising in France, Italy, England and Scotland during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Henri-Pierre Danloux (1753–1809).