Museum accessions.(High Museum of Art in Atlanta and Hillwood Museum and Gardens )

The High Museum of Art in Atlanta has acquired Architecture, a masterpiece of stained glass created by John La Farge about 1903 or 1904. Not only is it a major addition to the museums renowned Virginia Carroll Crawford Collection of American decorative arts from 1835 to 1920, which has just been reinstalled at the museum, but it also fulfills a long-cherished desire of the donor, who died last year, to add a large figural stained-glass window to the collection. Moreover, its subject is particularly apt for the High Museum, which has long gloried in its critically acclaimed building (opened in 1983) designed by Richard Meier and is currently undergoing an exciting expansion designed by Renzo Piano that is scheduled to open this fall.

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T square in one hand and compass in the other, here the figure Architecture leans on a Corinthian capital. Not surprisingly, the window was actually designed for an architect, John M. Huston of Philadelphia, who asked his friend and collaborator, the muralist Edwin Austin Abbey, to design a bookplate for use in the library of his house in Philadelphia; he then commissioned La Farge to create a stained-glass window based on the same design for the stair landing of the house. William Brantley Van Ingen, a mural painter who worked for La Farge, drew the cartoon that was used to translate the design into glass, and La Farge used the many innovative techniques at his command to create it. For example, he layered different colors of glass and paint to achieve extraordinarily naturalistic effects, such as the ripples in the folds of the figure's drapery and the alabaster-like appearance of the column and capital on which she leans. Small glass marbles, each leaded, create the halolike effect around the edges, and the extraordinary deep blue of the background is itself a tour de force of paint and glass.

Equally wonderful is the writing table, illustrated below, which was recently acquired by Hillwood Museum and Gardens in Washington, D. C. Lavishly decorated with verre eglomise, the table is related to three tables commissioned from the Saint Petersburg shop of Heinrich Gambs and Johann Ott by Maria ...