Enfilade

The long 18th century in the April issue of The Burlington:

The Burlington Magazine 167 (April 2025) | Art in Britain

e d i t o r i a l

RA Lecture Illustration of the Colonnade at Burlington House, produced by the Soane Office. ca.1806–17, pen, pencil, wash and coloured washes on wove paper, 72 × 67 cm (London: Sir John Soane’s Museum).

• “Boughton’s Heavenly Visions,” pp. 327–29.
Boughton in Northamptonshire is an improbable dream of a house. It is an essay in restrained French Classicism that was gently set into the English countryside in the late seventeenth century, encasing an older building. The house was chiefly the creation of the francophile Ralph, 1st Duke of Montagu (1638–1709), who served as Charles II’s ambassador to the court of Louis XIV. Its most splendid internal feature is the so-called Grand Apartment, which consists of a parade of impressive state rooms.

a r t i c l e s

• William Aslet, “The Discovery of James Gibbs’s Designs for the Façade of Burlington House,” pp. 354–67.
A reassessment of drawings by Gibbs in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, demonstrates that, as well as the stables and service wings and celebrated colonnade, the architect provided an unexecuted design for the façade of Burlington House, London—an aspect of the project with which he has hitherto not been connected. This discovery deepens our understanding of one of the most important townhouse commissions of eighteenth-century Britain and the evolving taste of Lord Burlington.

• Adriana Concin, “A Serendipitous Discovery: A Lost Italian Portrait from Horace Walpole’s Miniature Cabinet,” pp. 368–75.
Among the portraits in Horace Walpole’s renowned collection at Strawberry Hill were a number of images of Bianca Cappello, a Medici grand duchess of some notoriety. Here the rediscovery of a late sixteenth-century Italian miniature once displayed in Walpole’s cabinet is discussed; long thought to depict Cappello, it is now attributed to Lavinia Fontana.

• Edward Town and Jessica David, “The Portraits of Alice Spencer, Countess of Derby, and Her Family by Paul van Somer,” pp. 376–85.
Research into a portrait at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, has revealed the identities of twelve Jacobean portraits attributed to the Flemish painter Paul van Somer. The portraits were probably commissioned by Alice Spencer, Countess of Derby, and create a potent illustration of her dynastic heritage. [The research depends in part upon the eighteenth-century provenance of these portraits.]

r e v i e w s

• Anna Koldeweij, Review of the exhibition Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art (Alte Pinakothek, Munich, 2024–25; Toledo Museum of Art, 2025; MFA, Boston 2025), pp. 393–96.

• Christine Gardner-Dseagu, Review of the exhibition catalogue Penelope, ed. by Alessandra Sarchi and Claudio Franzoni (Electa, 2024), pp. 404–07.

• Andreina D’Agliano, Review of the exhibition catalogue, Magnificence of Rococo: Kaendler’s Meissen Porcelain Figures, ed. by Alfredo Reyes and Claudia Bodinek (Arnoldsche, 2024), pp. 412–14.

• Stephen Lloyd, Review of Susan Sloman, British Portrait Miniatures from the Thomson Collection (Ad Ilissum, 2024), pp. 418–19.

• Natalie Rudd, Review of Discovering Women Sculptors, ed. by Marjorie Trusted and Joanna Barnes (PSSA Publishing, 2023), pp. 422–23.