The story
In the paper-mill town of Glens Falls, in upstate New York, Charlotte Pruyn Hyde built herself an Italian Renaissance villa around a skylit courtyard, finished in 1912. Her family had made its money in pulp and paper on the Hudson, and she and her husband filled the house with old-master paintings bought on trips abroad.
She left the house and its contents as a public museum, and it is still shown as a home, the pictures hung among the family's own furniture. The rooms hold work by Botticelli, El Greco, Rubens, Ingres and Courbet, alongside a Picasso.
The prize is a small Rembrandt, a head of Christ painted in the 1640s that passed through a string of European collections before reaching this mill town, where it hangs in one of the family's former rooms.
