NEW ACQUISITIONS

EACH year the U.S. grows a bit richer in the rest of the world's art. Some of its finest fruits (opposite and overleaf) have fallen recently to museums in Boston, Detroit and San Francisco.

Boston's Jan Steen is an important painting by an artist as yet poorly represented in America. The Dutch rank Steen (1626-1679) with the greatest--partly for his immense illustrative skill but even more for the gusto with which he embraced life in his pictures. His Feast may actually represent his own family, and he may be the laughing man facing the observer. The baby of the crowd wears a paper crown and rules the festivities. The older children seem to be playing a game like that in the nursery rhyme, "Jack be nimble."

Detroit's Rubens has been called the finest of his sketches to be seen in the U.S. He painted it originally as a study for a big, sumptuous tapestry. The classic grandeur Rubens intended is conveyed by the small study, but casually, which makes it all the more effective. The picture was one of 15 little gems of European art that hung in the Grosse Pointe home of Philanthropist Edgar B. Whitcomb and his wife until both died last year and bequeathed them to the Detroit Institute.

San Francisco's Boucher was painted for Mme. de Pompadour, passed to an English collection in the 19th century and moved westward again to America. Sweet and cool as a sundae, the canvas shows the best of Boucher's easy sensualism. Because his temperament accorded perfectly with his time and place, and because of his decorative genius, Boucher was showered with honors, made Peintre du Roi and Director of the Paris Academy. His fame perished in the French Revolution--to be eventually restored by posterity. Curiously, his Diana is not Diana at all, but Jupiter, who seduced Callisto in the guise of a goddess.

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