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This blazing June issue allows armchair travellers to go on extensive tours and visit virtually early Renaissance Siena, seventeenth-century Spain and Portugal, eighteenth-century Venice and twentieth-century London. It includes an article on the travels of the 1st Earl of Sandwich in the Iberian peninsula in the 1660s and the hitherto undiscussed observations he recorded in his Journal about buildings and works of art; they feature the list of paintings in the Spanish Royal Collection he sought to have copied and his notes on El Escorial. Another article presents new research on Ribera’s paintings of philosophers in the collection of the 3rd Duke of Alcalá and their complex history. Meanwhile, two British royal portraits by Joshua Reynolds at Kassel, which have been rediscovered, are fully considered for the first time. Reynolds also features among a rich array of Shorter Notices, where an unpublished letter by him sent to Florence in 1785 is assessed.
Other notices include the analysis of a portrait of a canon by Sofonisba Anguissola from 1602, which was thought to have been lost, a consideration of the English patrons of Francesco Guardi and a rediscovered photographic portrait of Camille Claudel, dating from her visit to Somerset in the 1880s.
The major exhibition ‘Siena: the Rise of Painting, 1300–50’, which travelled from New York to London, is reviewed, along with shows on the Bassano family of painters, Caravaggio and the Scottish Colourists; books on Donatello in Padua, Titian’s poetics, Edwin Lutyens, Pevsner’s sources of modern architecture and Frank Auerbach are also all authoritatively scrutinised.