On our trip to Maine and New England last month we visited four different small museums. As a result we unintentionally made it a focus of our trip.

Henry Moore at Storm King

By the time we realized we had a theme going on we were at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont.  All four of them were founded by rich families to preserve collections and to extend the memory of the family names.  There are hundreds of little museums spread around the USA.   More photos click here.

These four are an interesting cross section of the genre.

The Ogunquit Museum of American Art is on the coast in southwest Maine.  It was the most beautifully situated of the four we visited and had an eclectic collection of mostly 20th century American art.

The Currier Museum of Art is in Manchester, New Hampshire and is a very mixed collection of art.  Many of the early oils, mostly Dutch and Italian works, have been beautifully restored.  There were also sculptures and a very extensive collection of glass paper weights from Scotland and France.  There was no common theme.  We thought Currier meant etchings.  But it is the family name of people who made their money owning mills in Manchester and the museum is their legacy. Unfortunately it was raining when we were there so I didn’t take any pictures.

The Shelburne Museum is not small and its collection is not just art.  It is spread over several hundred acres and includes a covered bridge, a replica of the founders NYC apartment, a quilt collection and hundreds of other small collections.  It was beautiful.

The Storm King Art Center is about an hour north of NYC near West Point.  Its collection of large scale outdoor sculptures made it the most focused of the four we visited on the trip.  The stone fence by Andrew Goldsworthy is by itself worth a visit.  They also exhibit some huge Calders (Mobiles) and a very nice Henry Moore.  I have visited Storm King a few times now and this was the first time it was sunny.  It is one of my favorite places in the world to view art.  More Storm King Photos and a link to my previous article.

I have mixed feeling about people who accumulate wealth and them use it to accumulate art.  Part of me thinks that the right use for that wealth was to build more job creating enterprises and that these museums signal a failure of the ownership class to invest in their communities.  Part of me really likes these little museums and the attempt by their founders to share the joy they found it their collections.

Click here to see the Photo Collection (20+/-)

Other Museums we have visited over the last few years that fit into this category are:

• The Elberton Granite Museum

• Sam Maloofs Furniture Museum

• The Texas History Museum at the Alamo

• The Steinbeck Museum

And in our neighborhood there are

• The Getty
• The Huntington
• The Norton Simon
• The Autry
• and The Pacific Asian Museum among many others