The Adoration of the Magi, Woodcut by Albrecht Durer . 275 Museum

BULLETIN OF THE
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
DECEMBER, 1937
VOLUME XXXII, NUMBER 12
COPYRIGHT, I937, BY
THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
Published monthly under the direction of the
Secretary of The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Fifth Avenue and Eighty-second Street, New
York, N. Y.; Winifred E. Howe, Editor.
Sent to all Members of the Museum without
charge; to others upon receipt of the subscription
price, two dollars a year, single copies twenty
cents. Copies are for sale and subscriptions are
taken at the Information Desk. Mail ordershould
be addressed to the Secretary of the Museum.
Entered as Second Class Matter June 3, 1927,
at the Post Office, New York, N. Y., under Act
of August 24, 1912.
CONTENTS
PAGE
Cover Illustration: The Adoration of the
Magi, Woodcut by Albrecht Durer . 275
Museum Concerts, I938 . 276
The Bishop Collection ofJ ade and Other
Hard Stones . . 276
The Christmas Story in Art. . 277
Italian Renaissance Prints and Illustrated
Books . . 280
An Exchange of Egyptian Objects . .285
Early American Blown Glass . .287
A Group of Victorian Chintzes . . 288
The Ganymede Jewelry . . 290
Notes . .. 296
A Portrait by Sully-Gifts of Money-
Membership-American Paintings-The
Staff-Publication Note-An Egypto-
Arabic Woodcarving of the XI Century-
List of Accessions and Loans
Museum Events . 299
MUSEUM CONCERTS, 1938
The Trustees of the Museum have determined
to hold one series of four symphony
concerts this winter and to hold that series
in March. The decision to give the concerts
in March was reached because the concerts
under the direction of Arturo Toscanini to
be broadcast on Saturday evenings in January
by the National Broadcasting Company
will naturally attract a great many of the
people who attend Museum concerts.
Accordingly, on the four Saturday eve-
nings in March at eight o'clock, the Museum
will again offer a series of free symphony
concerts under the direction of David Mannes.
On these dates-March 5, 12, 19, and
26-the Museum will remain open from ten
a.m. until 10:45 p.m., affording an excellent
opportunity to visit the collections after the
usual business hours. Further details will be
announced later.
276
THE BISHOP COLLECTION
OF JADE AND OTHER
HARD STONES
On December 22d the Heber R. Bishop
collection will be shown in its new room
with improved lighting. The collection.
which was acquired by gift in I902, is still
the world's leading collection of Ch'ing dynasty
decorative jades. Of the various hard
stones which are called in common usage
"jade," it has examples of nearly every
variety. Essentially a collection of Chinese
jades, it includes a number of jades from
India, Siberia, Europe, and North and
South America, implements from the Pacific
islands, and purely mineralogical specimens.
Besides the jade group there are fine examples
of other hard stones such as crystal,
carnelian, lapis lazuli, agate, amethyst,
chalcedony-in all well over a thousand
items. Both the collection itself and the
catalogue bear witness to Mr. Bishop's very
intimate and personal interest in jade. The
catalogue is really more than a catalogueit
was made by a distinguished group of
scientists and is still the most monumental
work on jade.1
Lovely to look at and lovely to touch,
jade has been admired and used by various
peoples over a long period of time. but
nobody has used it so much or so beautifully
as the Chinese. The early Chinese dynasties
got their jade from what is now Chinese
Turkestan and, it is said, from what is now
western Kansu. A certain amount still comes
from these provinces, but since the eighteenth
century the greatest source of supply
has been upper Burma. The Burmese quarries
have been known since the thirteenth
century, and while it is said that regular
1 The Bishop Collection: Investigations and
Studies in Jade (New York, 1906).
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trade did not commence until 1784, the
quantity of jade objects produced by the
Chinese during the seventeenth century
and throughout the eighteenth indicates
that a good deal of jade was being imported
much earlier.
Westerners who discover Chinese art
mostly go slightly dotty. With a good three
millenniums to skip about in they attach an
enormous value to mere age, as if archae-
ology were a kind of endurance test. Start-
ing from prehistoric scratch, they give up
at the twelfth century, and anything later
than that can't possibly be any good. While
there is something in this, they would do
better to run the whole course. Many of us
accept the theory that there have been
many changes in the flora and fauna of this
earth, but we have the idea that once man
was created he was about the last word in
perfection and that, except for having
accumulated skill and experience as each
generation thinks it has, we are about the
same article that we were in the beginning.
Heavens! If we could get them into crino-
line and trousers, most of us would trot out
Adam and Eve with our immediate ances-
tors with pleasure.
But it seems as if something else had been
going on that we haven't reckoned with, be-
cause when one looks back through the
centuries, it is strange that on the two sides
of the world, and with very little communi-
cation, such different races have in succes-
sive periods produced types of thinking and
cultures which were so much alike in quality.
Strange, for example, that Gautama, Con-
fucius, and the best of the Greek philoso-
phers came along very much at the same
time; strange that in the twelfth century
Chinese Buddhist sculpture and western
Romanesque sculpture had so many sim-
ilarities that in many instances they are
almost interchangeable. Later, one may put
it down to trade and intercourse if one
wants to, but that is not enough to account
for the likeness in taste of eighteenth-cen-
tury China and eighteenth-century Europe
or to explain just why China should turn
out a Victorian period in the nineteenth
century, and one rather worse if anything
than our own. Isn't it possible that for
better or for worse the human mind has
277
been undergoing a deeper and more funda-
mental evolution than we generally think?
All this is pertinent to the Bishop jades
because China gives us the most continuous
pageant of what a race can do, and while
one may prefer the brutal simplicities of
Han and the fattened ease of Sung to the
nervous brilliancy of Ch'ien Lung, there is
no sense in putting a time limit on one's
personal pleasures. After all, why shouldn't
living be a pleasure and being alive a pleas-
ure; why shouldn't what we call works
of art be a pleasure and a joy instead of
drudgery and a chore? As a matter of fact,
when it comes to performance, to versa-
tility, to skill and finish, the Chinese reached
a climax in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. At no other time have such porce-
lains, such textiles, such jades been pro-
duced. They are incredible, and I am tired
to death of hearing people say they are no
good. The Bishop jade collection is a holi-
day comparable to the Russian ballet when
Nijinsky and Karsarvina and Pavlova were
weaving their marvelous patterns before
our inspired eyes, but in the jades the ex-
citement is caught and frozen for all time.
Furthermore, in addition to the sensual
pleasures of sight and touch, there is an
intellectual pleasure to be found in the
study of their decoration, which is not a
summing up but a sophisticated selection of
patterns, of symbols, traditions, and ideas,
skimmed like cream for the cultivated
Chinese of their day.
ALAN PRIEST.
THE CHRISTMAS STORY IN ART
The birth of the infant Christ and His
first days on earth, the source of Christmas
spirit throughout the centuries, receive
unusually graphic representation at the
Museum this year. An exhibition of The
Christmas Story in Art, to be seen in E 15,
the small gallery for special exhibitions,
from December 19 to January 2, offers rich
rewards to young and old admirers of this
holy subject. The Nativity, the Adoration
of the Shepherds, the Adoration of the Magi,
and the Flight into Egypt are the four events
illustrated. The material, comprising about
forty paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures,