The story
A Kansas farmer points across his fields at a black funnel cloud while his family hurries toward the storm cellar. John Steuart Curry, who grew up on a Kansas farm, painted Tornado Over Kansas in 1929, and in 1935 it was bought by the art museum in Muskegon, a lumber town on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. It has been one of the museum's best-known pictures ever since.
The money came from Charles Hackley, a lumber baron who left $150,000 in his will for "pictures of the best kind". The Hackley Art Gallery opened in 1912 in a building by the Chicago architect Solon S. Beman, beside Hackley Park in the centre of town, and the fund he left paid for many of its purchases. The gallery took the name Muskegon Museum of Art in 1980, and a recent expansion nearly doubled its size.
The collection now runs to about 5,500 works. Edward Hopper is here with New York Restaurant of 1922, a busy restaurant scene painted in the years when he still earned his living as an illustrator. James McNeill Whistler, the American painter who worked in London, is represented by a Study in Rose and Brown, and French Impressionism by landscapes of Alfred Sisley and Camille Pissarro, among them Pissarro's peasant woman with a goat in front of a house at Pontoise.
