The costume institute and its annual gala in May at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (the Met), have become fixtures on the museum world’s map and calendar. Whether you delight in them or are bemused by the spectacle they provide, or indeed try and take no notice at all, they are hard to ignore. The alignment they represent between fashion history, contemporary celebrity and the gravitas of a major museum is immensely beneficial in terms of fundraising and profile.

Sir, Through the hospitality of your Magazine we are launching an appeal for the conservation, reframing and rehanging of an important set of seventeenth-century paintings. We are making this appeal in honour of the art historian Alastair Laing, who died aged seventy-nine in 2024. It was he who identified the artist of this series as the Flemish painter Gérard Seghers (1591–1651).

An immensely successful director of the Wallace Collection, London, and a pre-eminent scholar of eighteenth-century Sèvres porcelain, Rosalind (‘Ros’) Savill had a profound and enduring impact both on the museum and the research she cared passionately about.