Museum accessions.

During its relatively brief existence in the late nineteenth century, the Tile Club was an informal but exclusive social and artistic organization made up primarily of American illustrators, painters, sculptors, and journalists, who met weekly to paint tiles as a means of promoting the ideals of the aesthetic movement. The entertaining history of the club and its output were explored at length in an exhibition several years ago curated by the late Ronald G. Pisano, who also wrote the accompanying book, The Tile Club and the Aesthetic Movement in America, as well as an article on the subject that appeared in this magazine ("The Tile Club, 1877-1887," February 2000, pp. 306-313). The club's exploits were recorded in its own day by such popular periodicals as Harper's Weekly, Century Magazine, and Scribner's Monthly, and, indeed, Scribner's sponsored several of the club members' summer forays up the Hudson River and to Long Island to explore, draw, and paint. A number of years ago a group of Tile Club drawings for the Century Magazine was given to the Heckscher Museum in Huntington, New York, and this past summer the museum acquired the double tile illustrated above, which was painted by Winslow Homer; one of the club's original members. In addition, the museum holds several other Tile Club tiles and related drawings, as well as William Merritt Chase's own copy of Stanford White's rare Book of the Tile Club (1887), making the museum the most complete repository of Tile Club material in the country.

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For more than a century Augustus Saint-Gaudens's Angel of Purity (Maria Mitchell Memorial) adorned the wall facing the Cadwalader family pew in Saint Stephen's Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. Now it can be contemplated by an even larger public at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which acquired it earlier this year. A testament to parental love and sorrow over the loss of a child, the memorial was commissioned by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell and his wife Mary Cadwalader Mitchell after the death of their daughter Maria Gouverneur Mitchell from diphtheria at the age of twenty-two in 1898. Saint-Gaudens originally declined the proposed commission because he had too much work, but he later relented, telling Mary Mitchell, "I shall throw aside all other work until I have done this thing for you." Lumi nous in white marble, the composition is a variation of the sculptor's famous Amor Caritas, which was cast in bronze.

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Henry Ossawa Tanner was born in Pittsburgh ...