Museum accessions.

A fine example of the arts and crafts pottery made by the Grueby Faience Company in Boston has been acquired by the Detroit Institute of Arts. With its satiny matte glazes, particularly the rich dark green, simple shape, and decoration drawn from nature, the so-called Trefoil Vase exemplifies the art wares that the firm began to make soon after it was incorporated in 1897, augmenting the line of architectural ceramics William Henry Grueby had been producing since 1892. In keeping with the tenets of the arts and crafts movement, each piece was hand built or thrown, with the decoration created by applied ropes of clay that were modeled into the body, and then the whole was covered with the matte glazes for which Grueby was famous. Indeed, the leaf and flower motifs that predominate in the pottery's output capitalized on the firm's most celebrated glaze color, known as Grueby green, which covers most of the vase illustrated, with the flowers picked out in yellow and a brighter green used for the stems. Most of t he decoration was carried out by young women graduates of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, the Massachusetts Normal Art School, and the Cowles Art School, all in Boston, and their initials are often found on the bottom. This vase, one of the largest objects produced by Grueby, bears the initials of Wilhelmina Post, who worked at the pottery from 1898 until 1907.

The Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., is the new home of the unrivaled collection of Japanese woodblock prints assembled over seven decades by the art collector and dealer Robert 0. Muller. Widely regarded by curators, art historians, and collectors around the world as the finest assemblage of Japanese prints from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, the collection had many suitors, and its fate was not revealed until the actual reading of Muller's ...