UNIVERSITY PARK, PA.- The Palmer Museum of Art continues its series of recent acquisition exhibitions with a selection from the American and European prints that have been added to the collection over the past few years. All date from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The American side offers two large-scale etchings from the 1880s by Thomas Hovenden and Anna Massey Lea Merritt. The latter, titled Eve Repentant, was Merritt's "diploma" plate, submitted for her election to the London Society of Etchers in 1887. Also among the works in the exhibition are a delicate color woodcut by Arthur Wesley Dow of a simple New England beach scene from circa 1895, an early John Taylor Arms etching of New York Harbor, titled The Sarah Jane, New York, and a circa 1917 linocut by Marguerite Zorach that reflects the artist's cubist years. Rounding out the American section are several lithographs from the 1920s and 30s, including a somewhat humorous depiction of a drawing class by Mabel Dwight, a rolling Midwest landscape by Grant Wood, and two radically different views of the lower East Side by Glenn O. Coleman and Raphael Soyer.

The European section is mostly French. It features two etchings by Barbizon artists Charles-François Daubigny and his lesser-known colleague Charles Émile Jacque. On view as well is the final state of what many consider to be Félix-Hilaire Buhot's finest work, L'Hiver à Paris from 1879, a print that bears the full array of intaglio processes for which the artist was well-known. The highlight of the exhibition is a large color woodcut by Auguste Lépere, who in the latter years of the nineteenth century played a central role in helping to transform relief printing to reproductive illustration to an independent and highly aesthetic form of artistic expression. The print, titled Les lames déferlent, marée de Septembre and dated circa 1901 was recently given to the Palmer Museum in memory of former docent Peg Stover.