ART .
THERE is no doubt when term begins again in Bond Street. At least twenty new exhibitions opened in London during the last three days of September and the first four of October; of which three are devoted importantly and pleasurably to the past. The pictures from Woburn Abbey, many of which have been touring the country for the best part of the year under Arts Council auspices, and are now arrived, together with some silver, at Burlington House, must take precedence, for they are the cream of a collection that, with a notable exception, is scarcely known to the public. It is a family collection, especially rich in por- traits, with an ad hoc lack of balance (though not of interest) that is emphasised by the fact that it has never been seriously depleted. The neat and delicate archaisms of the fine portrait of Queen Elizabeth, with two small panels of ships in the background, and the better-known, almost equally stylised, Jane Seymour from the Holbein studio, domi- nate the first room. Several Van Dycks, a splendid portrait of a youth (hitherto catalogued as a self-portrait) by Cuyp, three Rembrandts, a fine upstanding bust of himself by Hogarth, and a number of imposing Reynolds and Gainsboroughs (notice, for example, Francis, Marquess of Tavistock by the former ; Elizabeth, Duchess of Grafton by the latter) are outstanding. A large group of Canalettos is included, but the most beautiful landscape in the exhibition is perhaps Gainsborough's Wood- cutter Courting a Milkmaid, surely one of the most felicitous of all his early pastorals.
M. H. MIDDLETON.
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