Little Museums

The Heckscher Museum, in Huntington, wants to sell a George Grosz painting, "Eclipse of the Sun," to raise money to expand its facility and its collections. The museum bought the painting for $15,000 in 1968 and apparently has found a buyer will will take it off their hands for $15 million. Nice investment. Newsday has a story and a link to the picture itself.

One of the cultural advantages of living in this region is the number of good, small museums one can visit without having to go to Manhattan. The Aldrich in Ridgefield, the Yale Art Gallery and Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, the Florence Griswold in Old Lyme, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Bruce in Greenwich, the Katonah Museum, the Neuberger in Purchase. They're varied, relatively close, and easy to handle in a couple of hours. They also provide parents with the challenge of figuring out which bribe will work to persuade two kids to spend an afternoon in the car for the privilege of looking at a stodgy old Picasso or Winslow Homer.