The Manhattan Museum of Fine Arts is a fictional institution located in New York City, created by Frank Belknap Long in his novel The Horror from the Hills. In Long's story, the museum becomes enmeshed in horror when it acquires what it thinks is a statue of the entity Chaugnar Faugn.
Notable Staff[]
The president of the museum is Dr. George Francis Scollard; the curator of archaeology is Algernon Harris, who succeeded Halpin Chalmers.
The museum's field workers have included Richardson, who was tortured to death by the followers of Chaugnar Faugn on the Tsang Plateau, and Clark Ulman, who returned from Tsang as the god's mutilated slave. Other agents of the museum included Symons, a Chang Dynasty specialist who was "obliged to leave his left eye and a piece of his nose in a Buddhist temple near a place called Fen Chow Fu," and Francis Hogarth, who "lost eighty pounds and a perfectly good right arm somewhere between Lake Rudolph and Naivasha in the Anglo Egyptian Sudan."
Other employees of the museum include Cinney, a night guard who is slain by Chaugnar Faugn, and Jim Williams, an attendant who discovers Cinney's body.
Location[]
The museum appears to be located on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue; to get to work, Harris gets off the subway at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street, and takes a bus some distance before noticing that it's taking him past the museum.
Long does not specify whether the bus takes Harris uptown into the Upper West Side or downtown into Midtown. When Chaugnar Faugn leaves the museum to go on a rampage, his first victims are all reported as being between 35th and 48th streets, implying a Midtown location. However, Harris meets his boss Scollard on the bus, who says he "took the first train down"; the commuter train would have taken him to Grand Central Station, on 42nd Street, suggesting that they are on an uptown bus. Several museums are located on the stretch of Fifth Avenue from 82nd to 110th streets, known as Museum Mile; if the Manhattan Museum is located there, it would be directly across the street from Central Park, which is mentioned as one of the places Chaugnar Faugn might hide.
Collections[]
The Manhattan Museum appears to specialize in historical artefacts; the opening line of the novel mentions its "Egyptian, Graeco-Roman, Minoan, and Assyrian antiquities."
Notable items acquired by the museum during Harris's tenure include
mirrors of Graeco-Bactrian design and miniature tiger-dragons or too-tiehs from Central China dating from at least 200 B.C., enormous diorite Sphinxes from the Valley of the Nile, “Geometric” vases from Mycenaean Crete, incised pottery from Messina and Syracuse, linens and spindles from the Swiss Lakes, sculptured lintels from Yucatan and Mexico, Mayan and Manabí monoliths ten feet tall, Paleolithic Venuses from the rock caverns of the Pyrenees, and even a series of rare bilingual tablets in Hamitic and Latin from the site of Carthage.