Each year Notable Acquisitions is published as an adjunct to the Annual Report. Whereas the Annual Report provides extensive coverage on the activities of most Museum departments, with a complete list of new accessions, Notable Acquisitions is intended to single out those works that we deem notable, quite literally, and that merit fuller explanatory texts. It is understandable but no less regrettable, therefore, that in some years, owing to the paucity of the Metropolitan's acquisitions funds, certain departments can neither afford objects of real distinction nor even find themselves in the happy circumstances of receiving major gifts or bequests. In 1983–84, fate has dictated that several departments, which during other fiscal years could demonstrate support from loyal donors or draw on various funds for outstanding purchases, are not represented. Oddly, they are the three departments that deal with antiquity: Ancient Near Eastern Art, Greek and Roman Art, and Egyptian Art; all, ironically, have been in the limelight within the past eighteen months as a result of major installations of their permanent collections. Occasionally, the acquisition of a very few objects or even of a single extraordinary one completely exhausts the Museum's financial resources. The superb Saint John on Patmos by Hans Baldung Grien, illustrated on the cover of this publication, falls into this category. That the picture should have preempted other possible purchases we readily forgive, so important is it to the Museum's holdings of German paintings, to which it adds a wholly new dimension. This was understood by an impressive number of magnanimous friends, whose names appear on the label so that they might be acknowledged by viewers of the picture, each of whom will undoubtedly derive benefit and enjoyment from it. Brooke Astor, counted among the donors of the Baldung Grien painting, is also linked to the purchase of an exceptional, indeed unique, helmet, a sallet that was allegedly forged, gilded, and enameled for Boabdil, the last Nasrid king of Granada, toward the end of the fifteenth century. The Museum acquired the work from the armory of Lord Astor of Hever, and we are most grateful to The Vincent Astor Foundation for its generous funding. The Cloisters Fund enabled the Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters to purchase fifty-two delicately painted playing cards—the earliest known complete set—dating from the late fifteenth century, as well as a precious, exquisitely wrought saltcellar made in France in the mid-thirteenth century. Although The Jack and Belle Linsky Collection was accessioned in 1982, objects from it appear in this issue of Notable Acquisitions, as only now has it been comprehensively photographed, studied, published, and installed. Full due to this magnificent gift is given both in the Annual Report and in individual entries here. The entire collection is reproduced in the catalogue published by the Museum in June 1984 to coincide with the opening of The Jack and Belle Linsky Galleries.

The cover of this year's Notable Acquisitions celebrates the work of Peter Paul Rubens, one of those rare figures in the history of art who completely dominate their age. In his oeuvre, "Rubens molded life with the clay of optimism and reproduced its fundamental rhythms in pictures of sheer brilliance, in which the whole process of his inventive genius, his exuberance, and love of life are transmitted in the brushwork; its daring, variety, and verve equal that of his subjects, creating a synthetic unity that is the triumph of Northern Baroque painting ... If Rubens's love of life can be seen even in the most somber historical and religious subjects, how much more clearly is it expressed in the numerous paintings of his alluring young wife, Helena ... These paintings exude uncommon warmth and richness; they are Rubens's most intimate creations, unabashed manifestations of the tenderness, joy, and serenity that marked the last years of his life." I wrote these words fifteen years ago in a small monograph on Rubens. At the time the Metropolitan Museum owned neither a family group nor a self-portrait by the artist. That one of his supreme and most personal works in this genre, a painting of truly princely provenance—the dukes of Marlborough, the Rothschilds, and most recently Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman—should now enter the collection is cause for jubilation. Judging from the knot of visitors this picture regularly attracts, I can safely say that Rubens, His Wife Helena Fourment, and Their Son Peter Paul, arguably the greatest work by the artist in the United States, is already one of the most popular paintings in the Museum.

Once again, as in recent years, generous donors and patrons are mainly responsible for the Museum's acquisitions of major art works in 1984–85. The Metropolitan's own unrestricted purchase funds have been so outdistanced by soaring prices for works of art during the last decade that without the magnanimity and generosity of the Museum's friends, this year's group of new acquisitions would be of minor importance. 1984–85 was the year of twentieth-century art in regard to notable acquisitions. One bequest in this area is so large and so significant that it dominates all the Museum's other acquisitions for the year. Scofield Thayer, the pioneer collector of modern art and editor in chief of The Dial, a magazine of arts and letters founded in 1919, bequeathed to the Metropolitan his entire collection of more than five hundred works of art, a collection he formed between 1919 and 1924. The Dial provided a distinguished forum for avant-garde writers and critics—among them, e. e. cummings, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Virginia Woolf—as well as furnished its pages for the reproduction of the works of art that Thayer specifically acquired for publication in his magazine. The Scofield Thayer bequest includes a constellation of thirty-eight works on paper by Egon Schiele, three prints and four paintings by Henri Matisse, twenty-three paintings and works on paper by Pablo Picasso, and thirty-five sculptures and drawings by Gaston Lachaise. Other remarkable acquisitions in the field of twentieth-century art entered the Museum's collection in the past year. Heinz Berggruen, the foremost collector of the art of Paul Klee, one of the most original and influential artists of this century, gave to the Museum ninety paintings and drawings by that artist, three of which are reproduced in this publication. The Berggruen gift has provided the Metropolitan with a group of Klee's works that is not a random selection but is, rather, an exceptionally informed, sensitive, and varied whole, representing Klee at every stage of his career and at his very best. The discernment of another collector strongly manifests itself in the nine important paintings and works on paper by Willem de Kooning—four of which are published herein—that were acquired by a combination of gift and purchase from the estate of Thomas B. Hess, the former Consultative Chairman of the Department of Twentieth-Century Art at the Metropolitan and a distinguished connoisseur of this artist's oeuvre. Many individual sculptures given to the Museum during the past year are deserving of special notice. A cluster of Rodin bronzes was given to the Metropolitan by B. Gerald Cantor, a collector who has devoted years of his life to the study of Rodin's art and whose benefaction has enriched the Museum's extensive holdings by this great French sculptor. An important work by the noted English sculptor Anthony Caro, entitled Odalisque, was given by GFI/Knoll International Foundation. In another area, Alice Heeramaneck, who remains a great friend of this institution, presented us with a superb Mughal nephrite-hilted dagger, which ranks among the finest of its kind. As on so many occasions in recent years, it would be impossible to write a foreword to this publication without thanking Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, whose gifts this past year have greatly enriched the quality and range of the Metropolitan's collection of European seventeenth-century paintings. In addition to two large and powerful Italian Baroque masterpieces—Guercino's Samson Captured by the Philistines and Domenichino's late and commanding altarpiece The Assumption of the Virgin with Saints Nicholas of Myra and Anne—the Wrightsmans presented to the Museum a work of poetic character, entitled Clothing the Naked, by the Flemish painter Michiel Sweerts, whose works are rare indeed, and Eustache Le Sueur's The Rape of Tamar. The Le Sueur canvas handsomely closes a gap in the Museum's holdings that we were made keenly aware of at the time of the exhibition France in the Golden Age: Seventeenth-Century French Paintings in American Collections, when a painting by that artist owned by the Art Institute of Chicago was chosen for the cover of the French edition of the catalogue.

In any normal year so important and beautiful a work of art as the English Gothic ivory Virgin and Child acquired for The Cloisters would be a natural choice for the cover of this publication. It is a work of the utmost rarity, one of three extant English Gothic ivories, and the perfect pendant for the Bury St. Edmunds Cross, which so magnificently represents the Romanesque period in England at The Cloisters. But this year like the last has not been "any normal year," owing once again to the extraordinary generosity of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, who have given to the Museum an outstanding gift, the Portrait of a Young Woman by Johannes Vermeer. Invested with those special qualities that lift only a very few works of art to the level of the universal masterpiece, the Vermeer clearly and preemptively commands the cover. This haunting picture, one of the fewer than forty autograph works by this great poet among painters, is rare and unusual even within his oeuvre, as it is a bust-length portrait comparable in size and character only to a portrait of a girl by the artist in the Mauritshuis, The Hague. The mysterious and ineffable quality of the Wrightsman portrait led Théophile Thoré, the French critic who rediscovered Vermeer over a century ago, to compare the painting to the Mona Lisa. Although works of art in the class of Vermeer's Portrait of a Young Woman and the Gothic Virgin and Child are what make a great museum, this publication has the value of revealing that the "whispers" of art history also have their place in an acquisition policy. Some of the more modest examples, whether in the field of archaeology, the decorative arts, or in the form of the briefest notation on paper, are included here, as they all contribute to a better understanding and appreciation of the masterpieces. In turn these "minor" objects and the scholarly research they generate within the curatorial departments help to provide a more complete portrayal of civilizations whose character cannot be fully deduced from contact only with man's highest achievements.

This publication chronicles more than a decade of collecting by the Department of Arms and Armor at the Metropolitan Museum. The refurbished galleries in The Pierpont Morgan Wing opened in 1991 with a new presentation of about eleven hundred of the finest pieces from the Museum's encyclopedic collection, and since that time the department's holdings have continued to grow, with more than one hundred and fifty items added by purchase, gift, or bequest. This volume includes 58 of the most notable acquisitions. Many are remarkable for their diversity and extraordinary quality, condition, and beauty, and some for their artistic or historic importance, while others fill gaps or serve as documents, adding to the knowledge of this field of study.

The art collection assembled by Edgar Degas was remarkable not only for its quality, size, and depth but also for its revelation of Degas's artistic affinities. He acquired great numbers of works by the nineteenth-century French masters Ingres, Delacroix, and Daumier; he bought (or bartered his own pictures for) art by many of his contemporaries, particularly Manet, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Cassatt; and he acquired works by a wide range of other artists, from eminent to little known. The extent of Degas's holdings was not recognized until after his death, when the collection came up for auction in Paris in 1918 and, in what was called the sale of the century, was widely dispersed. Extensive research has made it possible to "reassemble" that collection in book form. This summary catalogue contains information on the more than five thousand works owned by Degas. For each work catalogued the entry includes, to the extent possible: a description with medium and dimensions; provenance information about Degas's acquisition and ownership of the work; information pertaining to the sale of the work in 1918 (or its disposal earlier), including the purchaser, purchase price, and other data; the current location; selected references; and an illustration. In a concordance, collection sale lot numbers are listed with their corresponding summary catalogue numbers. Previously, knowledge was fragmentary about the contents of Degas's collection and the whereabouts of those works. The authors of the summary catalogue accomplished their task by combing through a variety of sources, including annotated sale catalogues Degas's handwritten manuscript containing his own partial inventory, dealers' records, archives, and the contents of print and drawing study rooms, as well as by addressing inquiries to dealers, collectors, and curators, and by consulting important earlier scholarly work. While gaps remain that will surely be addressed by art historians in the future, this summary catalogue, with its wealth of new findings and its comprehensive organization, makes an invaluable contribution to scholarship on the subject, as well as to our understanding of this exceptional artist's collection.

Relaying a chronological account of the Metropolitan Museum's collection of pottery, porcelain and faïence, this book reveals the economic, cultural, and social history of diverse cultures through their ceramic and plastic arts. The catalogue has a global reach, covering the Far East, the Near East, and Europe while tracking the medium from its origins in Dynastic China to the elaborate works in the Rococo style. In his account, Pier also points to areas of the museum's ceramics and plastics collection that will continue to develop into a strong collection. At the time of writing, he identified the Museum's European and Near East collections as particularly promising.

Collecting is the lifeblood of the Metropolitan. From its myriad collections, spanning five thousand years and illustrating most of the known civilizations of history, spring all the significant functions of the Museum: education, communication, scholarship, preservation, and exhibition. Curiously enough, the mission of collecting has not up to now been explained to our public in all its complexities; this is the principal purpose of the exhibition Patterns of Collecting. Through it, Olga Raggio, Chairman of Western European Arts and the organizer of the show, has indicated why we collect specific works of art and how they came into the collections. The exhibition, and the present catalogue, are tributes to the extraordinary connoisseurship of the curatorial staff—their acumen, sensitivity, knowledge, and courage.