Museum accessions.

In 1918 Wanamaker's department store in New York City held a special display and sale of decorative looking glasses that were unusual collaborations between the artists Rockwell Kent and Max Kuehne. They featured reverse-painted glass panels by Kent and frames made by his friend Kuehne. Today, twenty-two of the mirrors survive in private and public collections, including the one illustrated below, which has recently been acquired by the Portland Museum of Art in Maine.

The looking glass embodies many of Kent's interests and passions, including a commitment to making art available not only to the elite but also to a larger populace, as was most clearly demonstrated by his production of prints and popular illustrations in addition to oil paintings. To the same end he also created designs for decorated ceramics, textiles, metalwork, and other functional, often mass-produced, household items, frequently drawing inspiration from both European and American craft traditions. For the series of mirrors, he looked back to examples with reverse-painted panels made in New England in the nineteenth century. According to Jake Wien, a Kent scholar, the mirrors represent an early foray by the artist into the concept of creating multiples, for the transferred a single design onto several glass panels and then colored each separately.

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Kent's art also often displays his interest in portraying humans as romantic heroes within a natural world, evident here in the charming figure set in a landscape with birds and flowers. The woman is thought to be modeled on Hildegarde Hirsch, a performer for the Ziegfeld Follies who was Kent's lover at the time. He was inspired by her beauty and German heritage to create several designs for the mirror panels with images derived from Germanic folk art and mythology.

The Portland Museum is preparing a major exhibition of Kent's work for the summer of 2005. It will include several of his reverse-paintings on glass, providing visitors with a good look at this little-known aspect of his oeuvre.

By the Americans were drinking far more coffee than tea, and by the end of the century after-dinner coffee became a routine part of American dining customs. The coffeepot and the coffee set illustrated here, both recently acquired by the Newark Museum in New Jersey, illustrate different aspects of this same story.

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