Visual Arts

Dallas Museum of Art

Louis Comfort Tiffany glass window, Summer

The Dallas Museum of Art is adding four acquisitions to its permanent collection, spanning a period from the early 1800s to 1930.

Purchased from private dealers through the museum's Eugene and Margaret McDermott Art Fund, these four pieces represent significant modes of American art, from the arts and crafts movement to American modernism. They are an early republic painting by Francis Guy, a turn-of-the-century linen chest by Gustav Stickley, a pair of Louis Comfort Tiffany stained-glass windows and an oil painting by Marsden Hartley.

The museum acquired them over the span of a year for an undisclosed amount.

Curator William Rudolph notes that Hartley's Mountains No. 19 is the first painting by the artist to enter the museum. The work was both a homecoming and a transition for Hartley. He painted it just after his second extended study in Europe and before he began his celebrated focus on Maine's mountainscapes.

"It's impossible to tell the story of modernism in America without Hartley," Dr. Rudolph says.

The Hartley now hangs alongside a work by Georgia O'Keeffe, his friend and colleague.

The museum placed Winter Scene in Brooklyn, a 19th-century landscape by Guy, kitty-corner to one of its most important works, Frederic Edwin Church's The Icebergs. For the Tiffany windows, however, a new wall will be built. Made in 1885-95 for a suite on the four seasons and featuring sea anemone and starfish – an aquatic fauna theme unique to this pair – the backlighted windows will be installed near the entrance to the decorative arts gallery.

One piece among the summer acquisitions will be part of an upcoming exhibition. For the "Gustave Stickley and the American Arts and Craft Movement" show in 2010, the chest will be the centerpiece in a re-creation of a 1903 model dining room designed by Stickley.

The McDermott Art Fund has been used for other significant acquisitions, including a 1912 still life by Georges Braque, a stainless-steel sculpture by David Smith, a fifth-century Peruvian vessel and a 17th-century Nigerian bronze figurine.

Kriston Capps is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C.