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COPYRIGHT 2001 Texas Monthly, Inc.
ROBERT MANNING'S LIFE seems to have been marked by several moments of unusual serendipity. One such moment was certainly the day in 1947 when the then 23-year-old native of Mart, a maintenance depot on the now defunct Missouri Pacific rail line between Houston and Fort Worth, arrived in New York City with the proverbial $50 in his pocket, a room at the YMCA, and a letter of acceptance from New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, the nation's most prestigious graduate program in art history. Two hours off the train, queued up to enroll in classes, the famously reserved Manning was so taken with the attractive young woman standing ahead of him in line that he introduced himself. The woman was Bertina Suida, the daughter of a distinguished Austrian art historian, and the result of that chance encounter was a 42-year marriage and a remarkable professional partnership that produced what may be the last great private collection of old master paintings and drawings assembled in this country.
Almost half a century after that meeting, the legacy of what is now known as the Suida-Manning Collection was ensured by an equally unlikely encounter. In 1994, two years after his wife had passed away and two years before his own death, Manning visited a cousin in Austin and casually dropped in at the Archer M. Huntingdon Art Gallery (renamed the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art in 1998), the little museum crammed into the University of Texas art building and two floors at the Harry Ramson Center. Manning asked a guard if he could speak with museum director Jessie Otto Hite, who had to admit to the visitor that...
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