As the present issue went to press, there was a month to go before the fate of James Tissot’s portrait of the art dealer Algernon Moses Marsden was to be decided. In June the Minister for Arts accepted the recommendation of the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art to defer to 16th September granting an export licence for the painting, which is illustrated in this issue in Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz’s article on Marsden’s rise and precipitous fall (pp.874– 87). 

In 1999 the artist Allan Sekula entered Lake Washington, near Seattle, and photographed himself swimming towards Bill Gates’s shoreline home. The resulting photographs accompanied a letter the artist wrote to Gates in 2002 about his purchase of Winslow Homer’s 1885 painting Lost on the Grand Banks for more than $30 million. ‘So why are you so interested in a picture of two poor lost dory fishermen, momentarily high on a swell, peering into a wall of fog?’ Sekula wonders.