NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE L ast week I was in Norwich in Connecticut for a memorial service. On the way home, we stopped in New Britain, a city of about 75,000 people, to visit the New Britain Museum of American Art. Among the art set, it’s well known as the local museum, but it’s also much loved in New Britain and the tony suburbs west of Hartford. I hadn’t been there in a few years.

It’s not a glitzy, fancy place, and it doesn’t seem ever to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, as does its neighbor, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. Rather, the New Britain Museum has a wonderful collection and gets to the business of art with dispatch and intelligence.

Skirmish in the Wilderness, by Winslow Homer from 1864, is there. It’s one of Homer’s unsung heavy hitters. Homer’s Civil War work doesn’t show much valor. Rather, he delivers the confusion and treachery of battle. Frederic Church’s West Rock, New Haven, from 1849, is one of the pictures that made Church, then 23, an art star. West Rock isn’t any old rock. A cave there hid three of the Puritan judges who sentenced King Charles I to die. After the Restoration, they fled to New England, where, soon enough, royal troops hunted them but never caught them. Ernest Lawton’s magnificent Spring Tapestry is there as well. He’s one of the best American Modernists. Rockwell Kent’s Toilers of the Sea, from 1907, is a Monhegan Island picture. Kent’s early Maine work is perfection.

Thomas Hart Benton’s mural series from 1932, The Arts of Life in America, occupies an entire gallery. It’s his rambunctious survey of American culture during the slough of the Depression, mostly music and dance, but Benton thought that gambling, praying, and horseshoes were part of our culture, too. It’s Benton’s Walt Whitman moment. The murals were commissioned for Juliana Force’s New York apartment in her early days as the Whitney’s first director. After she died in 1948, with Benton out of style, at least among art chatterers, the museum in New Britain bought the series for $500.

There’s plenty more first-rate art to see. The museum opened in 1903, focusing on American art only — in part because it was inexpensive – and, at 120 years old, the place has had its ups and downs. Why is it in New Britain, and how has it managed to survive?

New Britain is the most polyglot of New England cities, with thick concentrations of people with Polish, Italian, Ukrainian, Puerto Rican, black, Irish, and Quebecois heritage. Its Little Poland neighborhood is fun, has the look of experience, and is a success story as urban renewals go. New Britain’s also the home of Stanley Works and Black & Decker, now merged, and called the Hardware Capital of the World. It’s likely that most of us, on any given day, touch something made there.

Its politics are the fiercest in Connecticut, propelled by ethnic coalitions known to be shifty and porous. “Tough Tommy” Meskill was Connecticut’s governor in the early ’70s. He’d been New Britain’s mayor and a congressman. To be elected as a Republican in New Britain, as Meskill was, requires not any ol’ hard ass but a silicon-carbide ass. That’s the material used for tank armor.

It’s a rough-and-tumble town.

The city’s social and economic elite — its lawyers, doctors, company executives, among others — tended until the last generation or so to live there, in the Walnut Hill neighborhood, rather than fleeing to posh towns like West Hartford and Farmington. Good Victorian, Arts & Crafts, and Georgian Revival homes are aplenty, as is a potent sense of civic pride and commitment.

Walnut Hill Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, was developed in the 1860s and still adds cachet. The museum abuts the park and has always been a particular project of local plutocrats and social whirls. Starting when it opened, it bought contemporary American art and enough pre-1900 things to be considered a comprehensive collection.

The museum lived off capital for a while and still doesn’t have much money. It’s got a lovely new building, though, in which a good, eclectic collection looks happy, and it does exhibitions, some better than others. First-time visitors are likely to be shocked to find an art museum of its quality in a place like New Britain, still industrial, mostly working-class, with a seen-better-days look.

Years ago, I visited the museum when it was still in the stately Landers home, abutting Walnut Hill Park, that Grace Landers bequeathed to the museum in 1934. Before that, the museum had a gallery at the New Britain Institute, the city’s culture center. I looked at the years when art on the walls came into the collection. This is almost always part of the accession number on the wall label. It bought the Homer in 1944 and the Church in 1950. The Caress, a perfect Cassatt mother and baby, came in 1948. George Bellows’s Big Dory arrived in 1944.

In the ’40s, then, it had money to spend and the yen to acquire. American art wasn’t expensive. The museum bought well.

In the early ’50s, purchases became few and far between. The museum received gifts such as Kay Sage’s Unusual Thursday and George Tooker’s enigmatic Bird Watchers, and bought work by artists on the cusp of fame, including the 1857 painting This Little Piggy, by Lilly Martin Spencer, long neglected but revived in the ’90s. In a brilliant move, a group of illustrators gathered to ask fellow illustrators throughout the country to give examples of their work to the museum to build what is today one of the best illustration collections in the country. In 2007, the museum raised the money to buy Blue and Beyond Blue, a handsome ceiling sculpture by Dale Chihuly hanging over the main staircase.

It missed Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, and the Pictures Generation, more or less. The museum has examples from each movement but not of the same quality as its pre-1945 art.

Edward Burtynsky: Earth Observed is the new exhibition on view. Burtynsky (b. 1955) makes large color photographs of quarries, mines, dams, logging, and rail cuts, with some aerial views. He’s Canadian and trying to walk a tightrope hovering above the sublimity of his work and the gashes and scars that the landscape endures to accommodate consumer desire, otherwise known as human habitation.

What drew me to his work, and I’d never heard of him, were the photographs of granite quarries in Barre in central Vermont, not far from my home, and the marble quarries in Carrara in Italy. To me, most environmental art conveys “Oh, aren’t we humans terrible,” which isn’t profound or original. Sublimity and beauty are never tiresome.

The quarry photographs, shot in the early ’90s on overcast days, look like black-and-white pictures at first, but bits of color emerge. The lines marking future extraction of blocks make the stone walls, often flat, seem like abstract paintings, with veins suggesting de Kooning, whom the artist admires. It’s hard to fault the consumer or to think of what Burtynsky’s photographing as pillage. As forms, lines, and passages of white, gray, and black, the art’s too gorgeous.

Yes, some of the photographs are weird. A photograph of the backs of hundreds of pink-clad women in China working at a chicken-processing factory isn’t what Kay Thompson had in mind when she sang “Think Pink” in Funny Face. An aerial view of stepwells in India from 2010 depicts a deep, square pit whose walls support a zigzag network of stairs mounted on the walls, leading down to the water. It’s bizarre, but these wells have been around for centuries. An aerial view of a glacier in Iceland, made in 2012, is the one image untouched by humanity. It looks like a Georgia O’Keeffe painting.

I wish the exhibition had a catalogue. It’s Burtynsky’s biggest retrospective, and it’s a show with many lenders. Once the exhibition is over, the catalogue carries it into the future.

The museum’s home, once a house, got a couple of additions, both modest, but its moment arrived around 2000, and at the expense of the Wadsworth Atheneum. Douglas Hyland, who became the New Britain’s director in 1999, took advantage of the spectacular 2002 Atheneum-board meltdown in which the board chairman and three other trustees quit during a trustee meeting. Forcing the very public split were locals — a podunk aristocracy — who felt that the board had too many New Yorkers, undermining their wish to keep the museum as their exclusive club.

The terrible publicity, compounded by subsequent flops by the Atheneum board, left a mass of aggrieved donors as well as art lovers who preferred a museum that focused on art, not war. Hyland, who served as New Britain’s director until 2015, is a pro and a charmer. The museum slowly and organically became the civic museum serving not only New Britain but a swath of affluent towns surrounding it. It doesn’t help the Atheneum that no one wants to go to Hartford. While New Britain is hardly Paris, it’s not Hartford, either. The New Britain Museum is venerable, intimate, and easy for visitors, monied or otherwise, to make it their own.

The Atheneum is still suffering from inept, quarrelsome governance, past and present. Under Hyland’s leadership, new trustees, some refugees from the Atheneum, joined the New Britain board. He and the board raised the money — $22 million in three phases — to build a substantial, proper addition, create an endowment to run the place, add a parking lot, and renovate the old house into an art-education space. It looks like a strong, committed board.

It’s very satisfying, economically efficient space. Ann Beha, a Boston architect specializing in handsome, solid buildings housing culture, designed it, but it feels like a collaboration in the best possible way. Beha had experience with institutions of learning. Hyland knew what museums need. That in itself expresses the spirit of New Britain.

Fundraising will be an issue for the museum into the future, but the good news is that nothing succeeds like success. Its endowment, at around $23 million, is small enough to make annual giving and earned income big priorities.

I wouldn’t give American art or good ol’ American dollars to the Wadsworth Atheneum. It’s not a stable organization, and it has tons of art reposing unseen in storage. The museum’s CEO was once a trustee and has no art background. Before the trustees appointed him, and that was with no search, he worked for Newman’s Own, the food company.

Great. One of the country’s great museums is run by a guy with deep knowledge of pitted prunes, beef jerky, and Parmesan crisps, and little, if any, knowledge of Piranesi, Bonnard, or Poussin. The New Britain Museum needs the money, spends it well, and uses the art it owns.

My quibbles are tiny. The website is to be admired for the absence of bells and whistles, but navigating the contents of the collection is impossible. The museum needs a digitization project so people know what it owns. That’s 8,000 objects. The curatorial vision is hit-and-miss. Or, more precisely, it has suffered from an absence of vision during periods when it didn’t have a curator. It’s done some crappy shows, a few, it seems, of work collected by friends of the trustees or made by artists who are friends of the trustees.

Brett Abbott is the museum’s new director. He’s an experienced photography curator and scholar who started, if I remember correctly, at the Getty and then ran the curatorial office at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth. He was a Williams graduate student when I was a Clark curator. He’ll add plenty of octane to the curatorial program.

I don’t know why the museum bought a painting by Robert Duncanson, but it did. He was a black Cincinnati landscapist who died in 1872 and who was derivative of Cole and Asher B. Durand. I’m all for buying the work of black American artists, but the museum should devote its limited dollars to young black artists who need the recognition. Their work is a better value. Overall, contemporary art’s the place to go. The contemporary art market is really a hundred micro-markets. There’s plenty of good value for smart shoppers.

For a surprising, gratifying art experience, not far from I-91, I’d suggest the New Britain Museum of American Art. In a city also called “New Britski,” you’ll also never lack for a good pierogi.