A vast trove of 19th- and early 20th-century New England painting, a 1,000-work private collection rich in White Mountain landscapes, still lifes, and modernist works by painters who once flourished around Provincetown, is headed to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., reports the Boston Globe.

Boston-area couple Sam and Sheila Robbins, who have been married for 60 years, acquired what they described as "cheap, dirty, beat-up" paintings over the course of decades by New England artists such as Robert Spear Dunning, Alfred Thompson Bricher, John Joseph Enneking, Karl Knaths, E. Ambrose Webster, and Benjamin Champney, as well as largely forgotten artists such as Mabel Williams and Elizabeth Hamilton Thayer Huntington.

“Being able to tease out the American story through a New England lens is very important to us,” said PEM’s deputy director, Lynda Roscoe Hartigan of the Robbins' gift. “This couple has had a love affair, not just with each other, but with American paintings and specifically the White Mountains. . . ."