The Currier Museum: Manchester's Art Palace, Born on the Edge of the Crash

In the eighteen nineties, Moody Currier, a former governor of New Hampshire and one of Manchester's wealthiest citizens, began talking with his wife Hannah about leaving the city an art museum. Neither lived to see it. Moody died in eighteen ninety-eight; Hannah in nineteen fifteen. But their estate, their house, and their intention survived them, and the Currier Gallery of Art was established under the terms of their will.

The building that opened in October of nineteen twenty-nine was a handsome Italian palazzo in brick and limestone, designed by the New York firm of Tilton and Githens. It opened on a Tuesday. Within days, the stock market collapsed, and the Great Depression began. The Currier was born into the hardest decade in American economic history.

It survived because it was endowed, not dependent on gate receipts, and because its first director, Maud Briggs, was one of the first women to lead an art museum in the United States. Briggs ran the institution through the Depression and beyond, building a collection of American and European paintings and decorative arts that punched well above its weight for a city of Manchester's size.

Today the museum is best known outside New Hampshire for a remarkable architectural asset: it owns and operates the two Frank Lloyd Wright houses in Manchester, including the Zimmerman House, a Usonian design open to visitors. Few regional art museums in America can claim a Frank Lloyd Wright home as part of their campus.

The Currier also holds works by Georgia O'Keeffe, John Singer Sargent, and Winslow Homer, built from a collection that began because two people in the eighteen nineties decided Manchester deserved something lasting.