Art: Great Acquisitions

It was a distressing shock for the baron. He had barely bought a large Tiepolo in Venice in 1865 when the Venetian court, foretokening the laws against exporting art treasures that apply now in all major Western countries but the U.S. and Switzerland, ruled that he could not take it away. Baron de Schwiter, a diplomat, got an Austrian colleague to smuggle it out anyway; now, decades later, it has ended up in the U.S., the country whose eager art buying inspired most of the protectionist laws elsewhere. Last week the Boston Museum of Fine Arts announced that it had acquired the Tiepolo in Paris from the last of a series of owners who succeeded the baron. (The Louvre, which can prevent the export of any such treasure, felt that France has enough Tiepolos.)

The painting is considered to be the best Tiepolo in the U.S., but it is not the only great new public acquisition. The National Gallery in Washington. D.C., recently bought The Copley Family, which it put on display at the time of the visit of France's Minister of Culture André Malraux, and boasts that it is "the most important group portrait by an American artist."

Focus on the Foot. Until experts cleaned off the two centuries of grime that covered it, the Tiepolo bore the sinister title of Time Carrying Off Beauty. But on close examination, museum officials decided, as museum officials will, that some earlier expert had goofed. True enough, the old bearded figure with his wings, his chariot and scythe, was certainly Time; and even Beauty, bejeweled and almost nude, seemed to be true to tradition. But why, asked the museum, did the whole painting revolve around the woman's right leg, with the foot resting on a globe? She herself points at the leg; Cupid puts his hand on it; both Time and the parrot seem transfixed by it. All this attention, plus the globe, could only be explained, said the museum, if the female figure were Truth. She is supreme over the earth; she casts aside her rich garments as false vanities. Cupid's hourglass symbolizes the mortality of earthly love; the sun sheds Truth's light over the universe. And so the museum switched the title to Time Unveiling Truth.

Tenderness of Mood. The Copley Family presented the National Gallery with no such difficulty, but the painting has a drama of its own. Though painted in 1776, it is associated with American independence only negatively. When the revolutionary clouds began to gather, Mrs. Copley quit Boston with her children and her loyalist family and sailed for London. There, her husband, who had been painting in Italy, joined her. He had not seen his family for more than a year, and the group portrait was done to celebrate the reunion. Copley's style had lost its stiffness in Italy, but it is the tenderness of mood that makes the picture. A lesser artist might have produced a heap of sentimentality; Copley's portrait is one of deep and wholesome affection.