Museum accessions.

The great French romantic painter Eugene Delacroix was an avid horseman, his intimate knowledge of the animal evident in his many works depicting them. In the 1820s he executed several small studies of wild horses, of which the one illustrated here is considered the best. Never exhibited before, it was recently acquired by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, from descendants of the family that bought it at the sale of Delacroix's estate in Paris in 1864. At the Clark it joins more than twenty prints and drawings by the artist, as well as a number of other great horse scenes--by Theodore Gericault, Edgar Degas, and others. Indeed, next to collecting art, horses were Sterling Clark's great passion. His stallion Never Say Die won the Derby at Epsom in 1954 and was later bequeathed to the British National Stud. The Clark Art Institute's extensive holdings document his love for the horse.

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Entitled Two Horses Fighting in a Stormy Landscape, Delacroix's small painting was executed during the decade when he was shocking Parisian audiences with emotionally and politically charged works, such as The Massacres at Chios of 1824 (Musee du Louvre, Paris), a statement against the savage Turkish repression of the Greeks on the island of Chios in 1822. Vigorously painted and richly colored, Two Horses Fighting has a visual power that belies its intimate scale. The subject was probably drawn from the artist's imagination, although the composition was almost certainly based on drawings from life, as well as on Delacroix's study of the work of earlier artists such as Peter Paul Rubens. The canvas is featured in a special installation entitled Delacroix and the Horse, currently on view at the Clark Art Institute as a complement to its larger exhibition, The Clark Brothers Collect: Impressionist and Early Modern Paintings (see p. 16 of this issue).

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Inside the Joslyn Art Museum's lovely art deco building in Omaha, Nebraska, is a broad collection of fine arts ranging from antiquity to the present. It was ...