From Killington I headed to New Hampshire to see some old
friends of mine, Bob and Susan . Bob is currently teaching economics on a
contract at University of New Hampshire, so I thought I’d stop by and visit while
in northern New England. It doesn’t take all that long to get to Durham from
Killington, which gave me the opportunity to stop somewhere along the way.

About ten years ago I ordered a book from Amazon named “America’s
Art Museums: A Traveler’s Guide to the Great Collections Large and Small” by
author Suzanne Loebl. The book is essentially a guide to about two hundred art
museums across the U.S. and alerted me to where they all are, including many of
the smaller ones. I’ve treated it a little like a bible over the years and usually
consult it when I travel to take in the museums when I’m going somewhere.

One of those is the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New
Hampshire, a very good indoor attraction to visit on a very cold day. By the
standards of large public collections in big cities the Currier is quite small
but was definitely worth a stop while in the area . The museum has a small
European gallery but is mostly works by American artists, especially those
active in New England with a large portion of the collection modern and
contemporary works. The museum has a few large galleries for temporary
exhibitions, of which the big one at the time of my visit was American
photorealist painting. That’s not a genre I’m very familiar with, but the idea
is painting either from photography or from sight to make the output look as
realistic and close to photographic accuracy as possible, the antithesis of the
trend since the Impressionist movement towards ever more moody, surreal, and
abstract representations in art.