[30] ANNUAL REPORT Spring, and the Hudson Highlands looking south from Newburgh Bay. The unique qualities of the Society's well-known paintings by William H. Beard, The Bear Dance and The Bulls and the Bears in the Market, make the acquisition of an engraving entitled Flaw in the Title, published in New York in 1871, of special interest. Here too Beard has used the humorous forms of animals to show the foibles of man. We are also pleased to mention Oswald D. Reich's gift of a set of ninety portraits of famous people engraved by Jacques Reich (1852- 1923), who worked on the late nineteenth-century illustrations for Scribner's Cyclopedia of Painters and Paintings and Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography. Departmental Activities This year we began a schedule of major exhibitions on bicentennial themes that will be completed in 1976 when the entire museum will have on view subjects honoring the two hundredth anniversary of independence. The overall theme of this year's contribution, jointly funded by the Society and the National Endowment for the Arts, is New York to 1765: River, Bowery, Mill, and Beaver. The exhibition illustrates the development, transportation, industry, and economy in the five generations in New York that preceded the Revolution. In two shows that are part of the whole, variations on the major theme are sounded: in Pieter Schuyler and the Indians, Dutch, English, and Indian relations and the imagined and actual appearance of the province are explored; The Duyckincks —Merchants, Chiefs, and Painters, traces the colonial period in New York as it was seen and portrayed by three generations of a family important in the city's social, artistic, political, and economic life. At least three members of the family were painters,' and forty large portraits attributed to these artists are on view, half of them borrowed, the remainder from the Society's own collection. As a side benefit, these portraits, and others in this style that are known (a total of about eighty portraits), are the object of an intensive study on the likely production of Gerrit Duyckinck, his nephew, Evert Duyckinck III, and his son, Gerardus Duyckinck, for a catalog of the exhibition that is in preparation. Following this first