Rarely have I looked forward to a museum exhibition with quite the eagerness with which I’m anticipating a visit to “Crown of New England,” the paean to Mount Washington that opened October 1 at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire. It contains 146 paintings and historical objects, including canvases by Bierstadt, Cole, Homer, Kensett, and Champney among others who felt the enormous gravity of this magnificent mountain.

I’ve felt it myself, having been lured up Mount Washington’s slopes with an easel on my back summer after summer to try to capture the astounding tableau of values and grays and purples of its flanks and the fast moving spectacle of its skies. Nor is it easy, given the winds that can suddenly break over its ridges (once, when I had my back to it, my chair blew off the mountain). The highest wind speed ever recorded was on Mount Washington’s summit.

No wonder that most of the images in the Currier’s show are of Mount Washington from a distance. These include Albert Bierstadt’s “Emerald Pool,” a monumental ten-foot-wide canvas that this show, I’m told by the Currier’s Steve Konick, brings back to New England for the first time since it was painted in 1870. Bierstadt focuses on the waterfall and its pool in the forest, but glories in the way the mountain towers over it. I’ll spend an hour studying that one feature alone.

Champney’s painting is from even further away, across some of the lush meadows that lay in the flatter lands out of which rise Mount Washington and the other presidentials (Mounts Jefferson, Madison, Eisenhower, Jackson, Monroe, and Adams among them). He gets onto his canvas the lovely, and inevitable, way that distance lays a purple tone to all the mountains. It’s just one of the features of physics with which all mountain painters become acquainted, though few better than Champney.

Winslow Homer’s painting of the three artists working in Mount Washington’s foothills is also in the show. It usually hangs at the Portland, Maine, museum. It’s tiny in comparison to the Bierstadt, but how it captures just the fun of attempting to paint Mount Washington. I usually start out on the Mount Washington Auto Road, and then pull off at one of the staging areas, usually at an elevation above 5,000 feet, where all one gets are the scrub and rocks and broad outlines.

No doubt the Currier’s exhibition will prove to be a memorable moment for those who love painting and love the mountains. I was alerted to it by one of Maine’s greatest painters, Joel Babb, with whom I had the honor of going onto the flanks of Mount Washington over the summer. We set up at 6,000 feet, looking out toward Wildcat, and painted for three and a half hours, with a breeze just light enough to keep the bugs at bay. I finally put my own paints away and just watched a master at work.

The experience made me think of Winston Churchill, who was once asked why he so often chose to paint trees. “Because they don’t move,” he is supposed to have quipped. That can’t be said about Mount Washington. It seems to be moving all the time, as the clouds — which from sea level seem to be traveling so slowly — race across its ridges, pushing the shadows (and colors) around as if God were a finger-painter. It had to take on the part of Kensett, Bierstadt, Cole, and the boys a certain amount of courage, trying to beat God at His own game.

Mount Washington: The Crown of New England, on view at the Currier Museum of Art through January 16, 2017.