The story
The D'Amour Museum of Fine Arts is one of the cluster of museums around the Quadrangle in Springfield, Massachusetts, the New England mill city where Dr. Seuss grew up. It opened in 1933 in a steel-framed Art Deco building, paid for by the estate of a local couple, and later took the name of the philanthropists Michele and Donald D'Amour.
The collection is stronger than the small city might suggest. Its French Impressionist gallery holds work by Degas, Pissarro and Gauguin, and one of Claude Monet's grainstack paintings, made in 1893, two years after his famous series of the same stacks under changing light. The museum also keeps one of the country's largest collections of Currier and Ives prints, the hand-coloured lithographs that once hung in ordinary American parlours.
