Museum accessions.(Florida State University)

It is September again, the beginning of the school year in many parts of the country and so a good time to look at some of the recent acquisitions made by college and university art galleries. In 2000 Florida State University in Sarasota assumed the governance of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, part of the largest university museum complex in the nation. Having made a fortune in the family-owned circus business and later in real estate and the railroads, John and Mable Ringling established the art museum in 1927 and eventually supplied it with hundreds of paintings and decorative arts. The collection now numbers more than ten thousand objects from around the world and dating from ancient times to the present. The complex itself also includes Ca d'Zan, the Ringlings' recently restored Venetian Gothic revival mansion, built in 1926; the Circus Museum; and the Historic Asolo Theater, which incorporates decorative panels created in 1798 in Asolo, Italy, to honor the exiled queen of Cyprus, Caterina Cornaro, who held court in Asolo from 1489 to 1509. The theater was dismantled in the early 1930s, and the interior was acquired by the Ringling Museum in 1947. It has been closed for a decade for renovations that have recently been completed, so that performances of all sorts, from film to opera, are resuming.

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Early in 2006 a noted Sarasota art collector and philanthropist, Dr. Helga Wall-Apelt, presented the museum with the largest single gift ever received by Florida State University. In addition to expanding the museum and its endowment, her gift will fund the creation of the Dr. Helga Wall-Apelt Gallery of Asian Art to house her extensive collection, which includes jades, bronzes, and sculpture from China, Japan, and Southeast Asia.

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The European paintings and drawings collection at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum in South Hadley, Massachusetts, has been enriched by a number of additions, including Joseph Interpreting the Dreams of Pharaoh's Butler and Baker, by Crijn Hendricksz. Volmarijn (illustrated above). The dramatic lighting, the figures' spontaneous emotions ...