Washington ? Rhinestone handbags in the form of a Buddha, a sea urchin and the New York skyline are part of an unusual exhibit featuring purses as art.

They’re the work of Judith Leiber, who is an accidental artist.

She was accepted by King’s College in London to study chemistry in 1939, when she was 18.

“I came home to Hungary for the summer and I could no longer go back to London, so I decided to learn a trade,” she said.

She joined the handbag workers’ guild. Its first woman member, she passed from apprentice to journeyman to master workman in a system that dates from medieval times.

She married a GI who was studying art in liberated Budapest and they came to the United States when the war was over. Her firm, begun in 1963, started with four employees and increased to 200. She retired from the handbag business in 1999 when she was 78 and now designs silver under her maiden name Ditty Peto.

The display, which opens today at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, includes an evening bag in the form of Millie, the brown-and-white springer spaniel who belonged to former first lady Barbara Bush. Socks, the black-and-white cat of the Clinton family, stretches out nearby.

Leiber likes cooking and gardening, so there are handbags shaped as a tomato, an eggplant and a watermelon. A model that portrays a bundle of asparagus is a favorite of hers.

Leiber’s work has been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert in London and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The Corcoran is showing more than 160 handbags.

The show, “Fashioning Art,” closes Dec. 30.