The story
Maine's oldest public art museum, founded in 1882, is built around the state's own light and the painters who came for it. Its collection turns on Winslow Homer, who spent the last decades of his life in a studio on Prouts Neck, a rocky spit south of Portland, painting the heavy Atlantic surf with almost no people in it.
In 1976 Charles Shipman Payson, a Maine native, promised the museum his Homers and paid for a new building to hold them, designed by Henry Cobb of I.M. Pei's firm and opened in 1983, a brick block of pyramidal skylights around a bright central court. The museum later bought Homer's studio itself, restored it, and now runs tours out to the coast where the paintings were made.
Beyond Homer it holds Wyeths, American impressionists and European works, but the through-line is this stretch of northern coast and the artists it kept pulling back.
