Museum accessions.

September--traditionally the opening month of a new school year--seems a fitting time to look at acquisitions made by some of the many fine museums on college campuses. The Yale Center for British Art at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, which celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary this year, has acquired a number of works, including Whatman's Turkey Mill in Kent, a striking watercolor that, among other things, documents the intertwined developments of paper-making and the art of painting in watercolor. James Whatman acquired the Turkey Court paper mill in Kent, England, through marriage in 1740, and made it into the largest in the country. There he created a new form of paper mold, producing wove paper, the continued refinement of which was crucial to the evolution of watercolor painting in Britain. Painted on Whatman paper (the "J. Whatman" watermark is visible in the upper left corner of the sheet), the view was commissioned from Paul Sandby by James Whatman the younger in 1794, the year he sold the mill. It pictures not only the mill but also Vinter, the estate above it, which the younger Whatman purchased in 1782 and rebuilt, employing Humphry Repton to landscape the grounds. Sandby, who is known as the father of modern landscape painting in watercolors, surely found the surface of Whatman's wove paper to his liking, for it allowed him to produce detailed yet expansive views such as this.

Founded in 1876, the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum in South Hadley, Massachusetts, is one of the oldest teaching museums in the country. In its early years it concentrated on the acquisition of paintings, its first being Albert Bierstadt's Hetch Hetchy Canyon, but in recent decades it has been building its holdings of decorative arts. Naturally, one of its most important sources is the school's alumnae. Among the many and diverse gifts they have made in the past year or so are several pieces of silver, ranging from an eighteenth-century, tea urn by John Parker and Edward Wakelin of London to the spoons illustrated here. Datemarked for 1783/84, the spoons were made by ...