Museum accessions.(Brief Article)

The Catskills, Lake George, Singing Beach, Narragansett. It is July, and so there seems no more appropriate way to introduce the collection of American paintings featured here than with views of these summer vacation spots painted by nineteenth-century American artists. They are among nearly sixty American paintings collected by Henry Melville Fuller and recently bequeathed to the Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire. A trustee of the museum from 1964 until his death in 200l, Fuller's interests included music, history education, and the environment, but it was for his art collecting that he became known nationally Over the years he presented the Currier Gallery with a number of paintings, as well as with an important collection of glass paperweights; besides the sixty paintings, his bequest includes some $43 million for the purchase of works of art and to support the museum's operations. It brings full circle the story of a fortune made in Manchester in the nineteenth century when the city boom ed as a textile manufacturing center, and returned to it in the twenty-first.

Fuller's great-grandfather was Aretas Blood, who came to Manchester to manage the Manchester Locomotive Works and later bought the company which produced the engines that moved more and more of Manchester's, and the nation's, goods as the city thrived in the nineteenth century Born and raised in Manchester, Fuller lived much of his life in New York City but maintained a summer house near Manchester and later retired there. He began collecting American paintings in the 1960s, concentrating on landscapes, but also acquiring representative still lifes and genre paintings. While outstanding in terms of quality, the works he assembled are also intimate, initially acquired to hang on the walls of a house.

The earliest of the canvases illustrated here is Thomas Cole's Mill Dam on the Catskill Creek of 1841 (left), one of many views Cole painted along the creek from the time he took up residence in Catskill, New York, in 1836, until his death in 1848. When Cole first visited the Catskills in the 1820s, it was just beginning to be a destination for summer tourists, and his paintings of the region were instrumental in spurring interest in it, first for its ...