Russell and Carol - hayle and hearty

On a lighter note, there was some really interesting historical sleuthing behind the story of

• Revealed: Grand Tour loot of the Presa Inglesa

  Cargo bought by British gentlemen in 18th century, then captured by French, sheds light on Georgian travellers' tastes

Stories from 1779...

A British merchant ship called the Westmorland, en route from the Italian port of Leghorn to England, was on 7 January 1779 engaged off the coast of Spain by two warships from France, which had just entered the American War of Independence. We do not know exactly what happened – probably terrifying bursts of cannon fire were exchanged, for the Westmorland was armed – but the British ship was captured and taken to Málaga.

The Westmorland's cargo consisted largely of Italian foodstuffs: olive oil, anchovies and Parmesan. But there were also 54 crates of paintings, engravings, antique objects, marble sculptures, furniture and books. It was a precious cargo being sent back home by a number of aristocratic British gentlemen on the 18th-century equivalent of an elite gap year, the Grand Tour.

Fascinating! and even a Cornish connection:

The most extravagant of the travellers was Francis Basset, the heir to a Cornish tin-mining fortune. He had travelled down to Rome and Naples through France, and having sent possessions back to England on board the Westmorland, he himself then travelled overland to Venice to continue his tour. Evidence of his outward route comes from a guidebook – A Relation of a Journey to the Glaciers in the Dutchy [sic] of Savoy – which would have helped him and his tutor through the Alps.

In Rome, Basset commissioned a portrait of himself by the artist Pompeo Batoni, the artist to commission at the time. That work – which portrays Basset leaning on an antique sculpture, with St Peter's in the background – had hung, its sitter unidentified, in the Prado in Madrid until the recent research.

Basset also bought 14 volumes of engravings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi and a series of works by John Robert Cozens. Chief curator at the Yale Centre for British Art in Connecticut, Scott Wilcox, where the exhibition travels next October, described these as "the missing link in the development of one of the greatest watercolourists of the 18th century".

He also sent back a batch of scores of Haydn string quartets, and his copy of the latest experimental novel – Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy – testament to the breadth of his chic and learned tastes.