Nation IN BRIEF : NEW YORK : Annenberg Donates Van Gogh to Museum

Publishing magnate Walter H. Annenberg has donated Vincent Van Gogh’s “Wheat Field With Cypresses” to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Annenberg, the former U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, said he recently paid $57 million for the 1889 scene of a wind-swept landscape beneath a roiling sky. Annenberg said he acquired the work from the family of Swiss industrialist Emil G. Burke. “It is one of the great paintings I have admired over the years,” Annenberg said. A Metropolitan Museum trustee, he also recently bought the museum another Van Gogh, “Shoes,” painted in 1888. Two years ago he promised to leave the museum his collection of more than 50 Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and 20th-Century paintings, which has been valued at up to $1 billion.