The story
In 2022 the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, bought a small painting that had been out of sight for about 40 years. It shows a smiling boy holding grapes in his hat, and it is by Judith Leyster, a 17th-century painter from Haarlem in the Netherlands, of whom fewer than 20 works are securely known. In the 1950s it belonged to the comedian Red Skelton. It then went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which sold it in 1977, and nobody knew where it was until a Dutch dealer brought it back to light.
The museum itself grew from a bequest by Moody Currier, a former governor of New Hampshire, and his wife Hannah, and it opened in 1929 in a Renaissance Revival building by the New York firm Tilton and Githens. European and American paintings hang side by side. Claude Monet's Bridge at Bougival of 1869, bought in 1949, is the Currier picture other museums ask to borrow more than any other. Edward Hopper's The Bootleggers, from 1925, shows a motorboat heading for a lonely house on the shore in the years of Prohibition, and John Singer Sargent's portrait of Lady Curzon dates from the same year.
The Currier also owns two houses by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The Zimmerman House, designed in 1950, still has the furniture, the garden and even the mailbox that Wright drew for it, and visitors reach it on a tour from the museum.
