IN HIS WILL, Diego Fernández Cabrera y Bobadilla, 3rd Conde de Chinchón (died 23rd September 1608), listed the titles he had earned during his political career and requested that if he died while in service at the court of Madrid, his body be taken back to Chinchón to be buried in his chapel. He had invested heavily in the chapel’s construction and decoration, had hired the king’s artists to work for him, including Pompeo Leoni, one of the most gifted sculptors in Spain, and ordered important paintings from Italy. Because of his political influence, the paintings were sent as state gifts from Florence and included works by Alessandro Allori and Francesco Bassano. In its design and impressive decoration, his burial chapel made explicit reference to the high altar chapel in S. Lorenzo in the Escorial where the families of Charles V and Philip II were commemorated.

A LARGE PAINTING by John Brett, which has been known for many years as Shipwreck after a typhoon (Figs.10 and 11), has recently undergone restoration at the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum in Bournemouth. In the Gallery’s Bulletin for 1929 it was described as a depiction of a sunset in the East, and dated to 1898:
The scene is laid in Eastern waters, and some few years ago when the late Rear-Admiral Winnington Ingram (brother of the Bishop of London) was visiting the gallery he gave more attention to this picture than any other, remarking that it was very realistic, and he had often seen similar cloud effects and stormy skies when on duty in the East. ‘That kind of thing’, he added, ‘is never seen here but is perfectly true out there’. However, one can see very fine wild cloud effects at sunset over the sea from the upper windows of this Museum building.

GEORGE ZARNECKI, who died on 8th September, just four days short of his ninety-third birthday, must surely have been the last of the art historians whose conception of the discipline was consol­idated before the 1939–45 war, that is to say in terms which had been axiomatic in Mitteleuropa since the end of the nineteenth century. He was born in imperial Russia, almost certainly a refugee from the war zone which in 1915 was advancing eastwards across what had once been, and was shortly to be again, the country of Poland, and it was to Cracow that his family went to live when the First World War was over. Although he spent two-thirds of his long life in Britain, there was a sense in which he never ceased to be Polish. His Englishness, though undoubtedly impressive, was a veneer spread thinly over a very un-English core.

PAUL OVERY, critic, historian and, recently, a contributor to THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE, died on 7th August 2008 at the age of sixty-eight. His career as a writer on art began in the early 1960s with the radical magazine Axle, which he founded with a group of friends, and lasted for over forty years. Distinctive about his writing was that not only did he span both journalistic and academic modes but, most particularly, that he wrote about twentieth-century art, architecture and design with equal authority in each of those fields – a rare ability in our current climate of specialisation.