It also tweaks the past a bit with several of its newer offerings - doing so to affirm the show's laudable, and leavening, simplicity.

Certainly, the richness of the Athenaeum's children's book illustration holdings might surprise anyone more familiar with the fame of the Athenaeum's architectural library. Plentiful here are most of the old-favorite illustrators, their names familiar to the point of coziness. And their featured artistry radiates a fresh, even sometimes stunning splendor.

These images are set alongside several lively new illustrations, and supplemented with other loans of older pieces to fill in gaps. Nothing among these works seems unworthy of the company it keeps.

One of the pleasures of this show's perspective is the way it teeters between children's classics - such as the fanciful Just So Stories for Little Children (1902), which Rudyard Kipling wrote and illustrated; Arthur Rackham's wicked-witch images for Hansel and Gretel and other fairy tales; and N.C. Wyeth's rugged The Boy's King Arthur - and far humbler items.

The latter include early books of instruction in spelling, and in religious practice. Also fascinating are tiny Victorian-era hardcover books for very young children about country pets and about kinship. And eye-catching is the locally published book Headlong Career and Woful Ending of Precarious Piggy (1888).

Walter Crane's The Baby's Opera (1876) is another delight, as is John Tenniel's turn-of-the-century image "The White Rabbit." Likewise, a standout from that same era is the handsome calligraphy and design in a volume from the fine small press of Guernsey Moore of Germantown.

A wonderful summer treat awaits you.

Poster art

Ranging from the beautiful to the commercially mundane are Katherine Milhous' Pennsylvania tourism promotional posters, Philadelphia industry and safety posters by Robert Muchley, and bird posters for the Pennsylvania Game Commission, some of them anonymous.

At their best, they're marked by an unmistakable intensity of feeling, and some images are both original and moving. They're from the more than two million WPA posters printed from 35,000 designs, and only about 2,000 are known to exist today.

Laurence Miller of New Hope, owner-director of an eponymous photography gallery in New York, lent these. He began collecting them before 1999. And although the personal taste displayed here doesn't really deviate from the conventional standards of its day and from the program operating in Pennsylvania, the show's strength lies in the rare glimpse it gives into the kinds of choices made as to subjects and artists.

Painting pair

Malatesta, living beside the ocean for 18 years, displays a sea series reflecting her direct, perceptual experience of that watery expanse. Impressive is the material richness of paintings that show her desire to personalize, to include complicated detail, and to add inner light and warmth to what could have been a cold subject.

Birmingham achieves weathered elegance in the painted and marked-up mesh-fabric surfaces of her abstractions, inspired by the look and feel of worn walls. Bent on increasingly loosening the makeup of picture surfaces in a "painterly" way, this artist captures the qualities of lyricism and spontaneity that we value.