 Henry Melville Fuller was an art collector, art lover and trustee and patron of the Currier for more than 30 years. (Union Leader file photo) |
And when he died at age 87 in 2001, Henry Melville Fuller brought back to the state a major portion of that fortune in the form of the largest donation to a nonprofit organization the state had ever seen.
His $43 million bequest allowed the Currier Museum of Art to make purchases, improve operations, and begin planning for a capital campaign.
A few years earlier, Fuller made another gift to the museum, of which he was a member of the board of trustees — his beloved collection of more than 330 exquisite paperweights, which now are among the first beautiful objects that visitors see when they enter the first gallery. Fuller had been a trustee and patron of the Currier for more than 30 years, traveling from New York and his summer home in Nelson to do work for the gallery, attend its exhibitions and participate in its cultural events.
Fuller’s sister, Mary Fuller Russell, was equally as generous. She left a $24 million bequest to the New Hampshire Institute of Art in 1999, the largest gift ever to an independent art college.
Fuller, who made and grew his money in the investment field, had an $80 million estate, part of which included the family fortune that dated back to the 1850s. His great-grandfather, Aretas Blood, owned the Manchester Locomotive Works, which forged powerful steam engines in Manchester’s Millyard.
Fuller’s bequest was added to the museum’s endowment. While the present $21.4 million expansion is not part of Fuller’s bequest, it has allowed the museum to kick off its capital campaign in 2005, initiating a challenge to raise $13.4 million to support the expansion.
The museum each year budgets 5 percent of the Fuller endowment’s five-year income average. One of the first places that visitors see when they enter the museum, the European Gallery, is in the Henry Melville Fuller Pavilion.
Fuller was an art collector and art lover. He once lived in a large brick home on North River Road that now houses a law firm. He attended the Webster School, St. Paul’s School and Trinity College, which also received a large bequest on his death. He had been a trustee of the Currier since 1964.
He served in the U.S. Navy in World War II and retired as a stockbroker from Legg Mason Walker Woods in New York in 1993.
He was a nationally known collector of 19th century American art, and before he died had given most of his extensive collection to the Currier. It includes works by Thomas Cole, Eastman Johnson, Fitz Hugh Lane, Sanford Gifford, Alfred Bricher, Benjamin Champney, Martin Johnson Heade, Frederic Church, Asher Durand, Lilly Martin Spencer and Frank W. Benson.
His paperweight collection “is very well known” in paperweight-collecting circles, museum director Susan Strickler said, and it is considered one of the top five or six paperweight collections in America.
“One of the things that’s really fascinating about these is that each one is like a world in and of itself, whether it’s an abstract or botanical design or still life,” said Andrew Spahr, curator of the Currier, at the time the collection was given in 1998.
Some of the older examples in the collection reflect glassmaking techniques popular in their time, such as the “millefiori” (Italian for “thousand flowers”) paperweights that became popular novelty items in Europe in the 1840s.
Fuller told a reporter back in 1998 that he had always collected something, from the time he was a boy growing up in Manchester. From a childhood stamp collection to adult interests in Russian artifacts and, later, paintings from the Hudson River School, he collected with a rare combination of scholarship and passion.
“I always plunge in whole hog if I am interested in things,” he said at the time.
