ALTHOUGH THE REPUTATION of George Stubbs as a portraitist of his fellow men was never as high as that of ‘Mr Stubbs the Horse painter’, the human faces that contribute character to his equestrian pictures and conversation pieces are small miracles of portraiture. Mostly occupying little more than an inch or two in a larger canvas, they are painted with a sure eye for individuality.

A HANDBILL WAS issued in Paris in 1754–55 with the following advertisement:
Les plaisirs de la cour: ou théâtre sans pareil. Avis aux amateurs des beaux arts. La Peinture Architectorique & Prospective arrivée à son plus haut dégré de perfection. Le Sieur canalety, Peintre Venitien, convie les Curieux des Beaux Arts & de Peinture à voir son Théâtre sans pareil, composé des plus belles Vûes de l’Europe, comme Venise, Rome, Florence, Milan, Turin, Londres, Versailles, Strasbourg, plusieurs Ports de Mer, & autres morceaux d’Architecture antique & moderne, le tout peint à l’huile & de sa grandeur naturelle, les ayant vûs & tirés sur les lieux d’après nature, les ayant rendus susceptibles par la légéreté & la delicatesse du pinceau, s’étant acquis de la réputation par tout où il passe: il n’avoit dessein de les faire voir qu’à des personnes de l’Art & connoisseurs, afin des’attirer leur estime ainsi que leur conseil; mais ces Amateurs sentant le plaisir que cela pourroit procurer aux personnesde la Ville, l’ont engagé de les faire voir au Public.

in 1834 the Irish artist Martin Cregan, President of the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (RHA), since 1832, wrote to his old friend John Constable in London. The letter included some friendly comments in which the artist recalled his earlier contact with Constable, such as the occasion on which he had been Constable’s guest at his house in Charlotte Street. Aside from reminiscence, the letter had a clear purpose: to convey Cregan’s request to have ‘one or two of your pictures in our Exhn’, that is in the RHA’s annual exhibition that year, with all expenses paid. Constable’s reply to Cregan, previously unpublished, has now come to light (see Appendix I). It affords an opportunity to consider Constable’s connection with the RHA, which is seen in relation to other actions taken by Constable in the 1820s and early 1830s to extend his audience beyond the metropolitan one on which he had previously concentrated.

THE YEAR 1908 was a turning point in the career of Robert Bevan (1865–1925). His second solo exhibition at the Baillie Gallery, London, had been barely mentioned in the press, and he took the decision to exhibit at the inaugural exhibition in July at the Albert Hall of the Allied Artists’ Association. This exhibiting society, formed on the model of Paris’s Salon d’automne by the critic Frank Rutter, did not – unlike the Royal Academy – vet the submissions but, for a subscription, allowed artists to simply exhibit a fixed number of works. Although the first, vast exhibition consisted of over 4,000 items, each artist’s pictures were shown together as a group. The five pictures Bevan submitted cannot now be identified but they were admired by Spencer Gore and Harold Gilman, neither of whom had seen his work before, and they invited him to join the Fitzroy Street Group. Thus for the first time since his days in Pont-Aven, fourteen years earlier, Bevan became part of a group of painters with shared interests. More fundamentally, this gave him an opportunity to sell his work, and for it to be seen by important collectors and critics of contemporary British art.

AN EXAMINATION OF the friendship and professional association between Ben Nicholson and John Piper during the 1930s reveals telling details about the art world at that time, in particular the ideological cracks that began to appear in the British espousal of abstraction. Although Piper’s and Nicholson’s association was slight and short-lived, their exchange encapsulates a defining moment in the history of twentieth-century British art. Both men had worked to promote the modern movement in art in England, the achievement of which, by the mid-1930s, was being widely recognised: Alfred Barr, the influential director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, for instance, commented in the catalogue to his landmark exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art, held in 1936, that ‘perhaps the most surprising resurgence of abstract art has occurred in England’. But it was just at that moment that tensions appeared within the Nicholson/Piper alliance. Shortly afterwards, one of them decided to stand back from the imperatives of high modernism in order to let in an awareness of other things – the significance of place, memory, history, native traditions and nationalheritage, now set against the ominous situation in Europe. In the lead-up to the Second World War, a schism developed, leaving the two men on opposite sides of the divide.