Museum accessions.

Two eye-popping American paintings have been acquired by the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth. The earlier is Buffalo Hunt, by Alfred Jacob Miller, which sheds new light on his working methods. Illustrated above, the work is thought to date from soon after Miller's return from his pioneering trip to the Rocky Mountains in 1837, when the excitement of the trip and the scenes he had witnessed and captured in lively field sketches were fresh in his mind. Previously, he was believed to have simply worked the field sketches into more elaborate line and wash drawings and from these made the large romantic paintings of the West for which he has become so well known. But the discovery of this work (and another of equal quality, entitled Scene on Big Sandy River, that sold recently at auction), with its facile brushwork, tight composition, theatrical lighting, and visual immediacy, suggests an additional step in the process. Perhaps he just could not wait to translate the many drawings into the series of large paintings and so painted a few small oils as experiments or for his own pleasure. That the painting stayed in Miller's family supports such a theory. Certainly, the rendering is the most dramatic of the many variations on the theme of the buffalo hunt he executed.

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Equally stunning is Charles Herbert Moore's Hudson River, Above Catskill, one of the fullest expressions by an American painter of the Pre-Raphaelite ideals of the mid-nineteenth century. Absolutely true to nature, it transcends topographical detail to attain a visual poetry that invites contemplation, self-reflection, and spiritual enlightenment. Replete with religious symbolism (the river of life and the boat that navigates it, the rocks of ages, and the eternal evergreens, for example), the painting is also almost certainly an homage to Thomas Cole, the father of American landscape painting, and to his famous fourcanvas The Voyage of Life. In that great religious allegory, a lone boatman traverses various river-scapes representative of life, carried ever onward toward death, and, ultimately, to spiritual renewal. Moore's painting not only makes similar references, but it actually depicts a section of the Hudson River on (or very near) what had been Cole's property in Catskill, New York.

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The Bruce Museum of Arts and Science in Greenwich, Connecticut, has acquired the study illustrated at right, a preparatory sketch by Eastman Johnson for his painting The Counterfeiters of about 1853. Typical of Johnson's anecdotal genre subjects, The Counterfeiters (now in a private collection) depicts three men in a humble interior, where they are engaged in making false coins. The Bruce Museum's study depicts three possibilities for rendering the head of one of the seated men; the one at the left is the one Johnson chose. Both the study and the painting remained in the artist's possession until his death and were sold in the 1907 sale of his estate.

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In October 1890 John Singer ...