Editor's letter.

At the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum this month, visitors who come to see House Proud, an exhibition of watercolors of nineteenth-century interiors, will be supplied with magnifying glasses to help them examine every painted detail down to the little malachite treasures on the desk in Prince Karl of Prussia's study, and maybe even the diamond parures in his collection. It was the mission of the watercolorists and their patrons, the house proud owners of these vanished boudoirs, libraries, and music rooms, to stop time by means of painterly documentation. In talking to Shax Riegler about his article on the exhibition in this issue, I mentioned that my thirst for the concrete, for a lens to magnify every curisity curiosity in a cabinet, was keen enough, but that my enjoyment of the poetry and psychology that the literary critic Mario Praz sometimes extracted from such paintings in An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration was just as avid. He laughed and replied, "Well, you are in a minority there." Maybe so, and yet both approaches, the empirical and the impressionistic, seem to me to work best when joined together. Anyway, after we have looked, investigated, and felt our way through these rooms, we are usually still in the grip of mystery.

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Even a major discovery such as a daguerreotype of the nineteenth-century American folk artist Asa Ames, described so incisively here by Stacy Hollander, paradoxically adds to the enigma of this unsettling sculptor. What accounts for the bold, almost naked gaze of his figures, which a colleague of mine considers creepy and I find strangely beatific? We learn from Hollander that Ames's .subjects were mostly-drawn from a small circle of family and friends, and we realize again that the kind of work once thought anonymous was anything but, though much else about it may still elude us. Hollander supplies the kind of valuable information about Ames's ...