Museum accessions.

In our fractious world, it is nice when cooperation makes for a happy ending. Such is the case with John Frederick Kensett's Niagara Falls (above), which has been formally acquired by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, where it hangs amid one of the greatest collections of Hudson River school paintings in the world. The painting once belonged to Antoinette Eno Wood, a lifelong resident of Simsbury, Connecticut, and an original benefactor of the Abigail Phelps Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. In 1991 it was spotted by a staff member of the Wadsworth Atheneum hanging unnoticed in Eno Memorial Hall, where the Town of Simsbury and the Abigail Phelps Chapter have offices. Its fate became a matter of some debate when the town proposed selling the painting at auction or to a private collector. Fortunately an agreement has been reached by which the town relinquished its claim in return for the purchase of the painting by the museum, and the Phelps Chapter simultaneously donated its claim to the museum.

A cross town from the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Connecticut Historical Society has made several important additions to its textile holdings. Most significant is the extraordinary silk-embroidered picture worked by Faith Trumbull of Lebanon, Connecticut, in 1754, while she was a student at Elizabeth Murray's school for young ladies in Boston. Entitled Milking Scene and based on an engraving after a painting of the same tide by Nicolaes Pietersz. Berchem, this is one of three needlework pictures Trumbull is known to have executed. They descended in different branches of the family but are now all at the historical society which possesses a trove of Trumbull family material.

Illustrated at the far right is a detail of a ...