A New England collection on tour

Regional museums are among America's greatest cultural assets. Recently, many of them have organized loan exhibitions to make their finest holdings available to a larger public. The latest addition to this list is the Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, which, with the assistance of the American Federation of Arts in New York City, has mounted a traveling exhibition comprising eighty-eight American paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts objects. Entitled American Art from The Currier Gallery of Art, the show begins its national tour on December 3 at the Orlando Museum of Art in Orlando, Florida, where it will remain on view until January 28, 1996. Future locations will be listed in Calendar.

The paintings, furniture, glass, sculptures, silver, and pewter on view were made in America between the colonial period and the early twentieth century. These objects have been collected since Moody Currier (1806-1898) designated funds to construct a museum for Manchester. Upon the death of his wife, Hannah Slade Currier, in 1915, his vision became a reality. Moody was a businessman, editor, banker, politician, educator, and lawyer. Just about the only thing he was not was a collector. His estate stipulated that a board of trustees be established to oversee the construction of the museum and set a policy for acquisitions. Only in 1926 was the architectural commission awarded to the New York firm of Tilton and Githens, which designed a Renaissance-inspired palazzo with two floors of galleries.

The museum's first director was Maud Briggs Knowlton, who presided over the institution between 1929 and 1946. One of the first female museum administrators in America, she organized the museum's early loan exhibitions and shaped the permanent collection with purchases of European and American works of art. Her first acquisition was a contemporary American sculpture by Harriet Frishmuth. This was followed by eighteenth-century American decorative arts from the collection of Mrs. DeWitt Clinton Howe Palmer, which were joined in 1935 by John Singleton Copley's portrait of John Greene. European works of art enriched the collection soon thereafter.

By the time Gordon M. Smith assumed the directorship in 1946 the museum's objective was clear. Rather than buying lesser works in order to form a large, encyclopedic collection, the museum was committed to displaying fewer, important works. Each subsequent director has brought another field of interest to the Currier Gallery. The American decorative arts collection is particularly strong in objects originating in New Hampshire. In 1988 the house of Isadore and Lucille Zimmerman was bequeathed to the museum. Both the house and its furniture were designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and today it is the only Wright house in New England open to the public.

The catalogue of the exhibition contains contributions by Nancy B. Tieken, Karen Blanchfield, John H. Dryfhout, William N. Hosley, and Carol Troyen. It has 176 pages, 41 color plates, and 79 black-and-white illustrations and may be obtained for $28 (paper covers) plus $3.50 for shipping and handling from American Federation of Arts Publications, 41 East 65th Street, New York, New York 10021.