Museum accessions.

The objects illustrated here attest to the extraordinary quality of additions made to the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in the past year. The paintings are from a gift of eleven seventeenth-century Dutch examples presented by Hannah L. Carter, a LACMA trustee since 1989, and her late husband, Edward W. Carter, the museum's founding president and first chairman of the board. The Japanese lacquer chest and Mexican ceramic drinking vessel represent acquisitions made thanks to the generosity of the museum's 2003 Collectors Committee.

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Edward Carter purchased his first Dutch paintings in the mid-1950s, but he and his wife began collecting them in earnest in the late 1960s, resolving to acquire "the most representative collection of the finest quality seventeenth-century Dutch landscapes, seascapes, architectural interiors, town views, and still lifes in this country," with the long-term intention of bequeathing their holdings to LACMA.

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Simon de Vlieger's View of a Beach (illustrated at bottom left) epitomizes many of the seascapes and landscapes executed during the golden age of Dutch painting. Dominated by a magnificent sky and capturing the fine pervasive light, it depicts the sort of genre scene that appealed to the successful merchants who were the beneficiaries of Dutch economic expansion around the globe in the seventeenth century. Since they were pragmatic businessmen whose prosperity rested on shipping and fishing, they wanted works that reflected these realities in a detailed and straightforward manner. Here, fishermen go about their work on the shore, while stylishly dressed figures wait for passengers to come ashore from the ships at anchor.

Foreign trade not only brought exotic objects to the Netherlands but plants as well, most famously the tulip, from Turkey. Still-life flower painting ...