[Sir Sidney Colvin, Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.] Autograph Letter Signed ('Sidney Colvin') to 'Mr. Aldrich' [Stephen John Aldrich], regarding his childhood in Barnes, and some Dutch master paintings Aldrich is thinking of selling.

3pp., 8vo. Bifolium. Good, on lightly-aged paper. Aldrich is writing from Barnes, and Colvin writes that his address 'takes me back sixty years & more, when my people rented (for the winter of 1855-6) what was then Barnes Manor, - the house & park in a bend of the New River belonging to Lord Truro, - and has since been broken up and converted into Barnes Park.' He declines to visit Aldrich and see the pictures he mentions. 'Your account of them, at least of two of them, is so full & exact as to make a visit scarcely necessary: and these Low-country masters of the 17th century. Teniers & the rest are not among those who most interest me.' He is also at present 'occupying [himself] almost wholly with literary & not with artistic studies.' In his view the 'signed Solomon Ruysdael is almost sure to be authentic', while the Teniers 'may be a genuine replica, or part replica, by the master, or it may be a copy'. He advises Aldrich to send them to Christie', 'or perhaps better still for that class of painting to Robinson & Fisher's, - and let them take the chance of the : there are almost always enough intelligent dealers about to secure fair bidding for anything good.'