Museum accessions.

After journeying all the way to Texas, the over-mantel painting illustrated above has been returned to New Hampshire, where it was painted about 1789. It was acquired earlier, this year by the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, some thirty miles from where it originally hung in Exeter, New Hampshire. The overmantel is believed to have been painted for the house of Josiah Coffin Smith at 27 High Street in Exeter, which was sold to Nathaniel Gillman Jr. in 1823. Gillman's son Gardiner lived in the house until 1905, and not long thereafter he transferred ownership to his housekeeper. Harriet Tilton, who ran it as a boardinghouse for Phillips Exeter Academy, which acquired it in 1946 and now uses it for faculty housing. At some point, Tilton gave the overmantel to the Exeter Historical Society, but in 1972 the historical society sold it and it was acquired by the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, which decided to deaccession it last year.

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The existence of the overmantel is well documented in the literature on early American decorative painting, but the accuracy of the view has sometimes been a point of debate, with some believing it actually incorporates the buildings of Phillips Exeter Academy. In fact, according to Andrew Spahr, chief curator at the Currier Museum, it is almost certainly an amalgam of elements and not a specific view. The artist, possibly an itinerant, was clearly familiar with the New England landscape and architecture, but certain elements, such as the stone wall that cuts diagonally through the composition but does not appear to be typical of the stone walls built in New England, suggest that he might have traveled further south.

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When the Amon Carter Museum acquired the over-mantel painting illustrated at the left in 1972 it was in the early phases of building its collection. Over the ensuing years its mission came to focus more strongly on nineteenth-century American painting, and the eighteenth-century overmantel languished in storage until it was eventually sold. In the meantime the museum has avidly acquired works that are more suitable to its collecting aims, including strong holdings by Hudson River school artists. Recently, it acquired The View from Eagle Rock, New Jersey illustrated below, painted by Sanford Robinson Gifford in 1862. The View from Eagle Rock was almost certainly painted for Llewellyn Solomon Haskell, a nineteenth-century pharmaceutical magnate who built a house atop Eagle Rock in northeastern New Jersey. From it he had this breathtaking view over what later became Llewellyn Park near West Orange, New Jersey, a residential community he planned in collaboration with the renowned architect Alexander Jackson Davis. The painting remained in Haskell's family until last year, coming to light after the major retrospective exhibition Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford had been organized. The painting is listed in A Memorial Catalogue of the Paintings of Sanford Robinson Gifford, N.A...., which was compiled by the artist's friends after his death in 1880 and published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City the next year.

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Carrie Rebora Barratt's article on pages 108-117 of this issue concludes with Gilbert Stuart departing ...