Museum accessions.

The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, is presently completing a major two year renovation that will open to the public in May. One of the important elements in this project is increasing the space to show materials from the art gallery's growing late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century collections. This is an area that is fairly new to the Huntington, best-known for its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century collections of English and French painting and decorative arts (especially furniture). One of the linchpins of the new collections was the major acquisition in 1999 of material relating to the English designer William Morris; another is the large collection of furniture and other decorative arts designed by the California arts and crafts architects Greene and Greene.

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Recently the Huntington has acquired two important arts and crafts objects expressive of work in this period. One piece is of English make, a piano designed by Charles Robert Ashbee, made in 1904 by the Guild of Handicraft in Chipping Camden, Gloucestershire. The other is American, a library table by the furniture designer and craftsman Charles Rohlfs of Buffalo, New York.

Ashbee is often considered the successor of Morris. He combined simplicity and a primary concern for function with the same emphasis on truth to material and high quality craftsmanship that characterized the design reform movement. The upright piano at the left is one of at least five known examples designed by Ashbee and constructed by the guild for the famous piano makers John Broadwood and Sons. It was sold (after remaining several years in Ashbee's own Cheyne Walk house) to a Mrs. Clutton in New Zealand, where it remained until recently. The unconventional design is similar to the unusual pianos designed by Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott, with whom Ashbee had worked. Ashbee extended the top and sides forward and then closed them in like a cupboard; when the doors are open and the lid is raised the sound is at its height. When half closed, the doors allow the pianist a sense of privacy and the sound projects less. The exterior wood is inlaid mahogany with abstract ornament executed in checkered bands of holly, a favorite wood for inlay ...