Richard Brown Baker, whose journal excerpt "My Dinner with Jasper Johns" appeared in issue 143 ofThe Paris Review,is one of the foremost and most prescient collectors of twentieth-century paintings, prints, drawings and sculptures inAmerica. In 1995, he bequeathed a large portion of his collection to the Yale Museum of Art. Now eighty-six, he has beenkeeping a journal since his boyhood in Rhode Island.

I have shamefully neglected this diary, in which I had meant to chronicle the art life of our metropolis, but the botheration of Christmas was too much for me. I dammed up, and until this sunny May morning, have had not the tiniest inclination to write a word in it. But I think I should capture a reference to last night’s dinner party.