New Exhibition! Canvas and Cast: Highlights from the Bruce Museum’s Art Collection

On February 11, 2017, the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, opens its newest exhibition, Canvas and Cast: Highlights from the Bruce Museum’s Art Collection. Featuring 35 paintings and 7 sculptures from the Bruce’s growing collection, the show celebrates long-time favorites and many recent acquisitions representing significant moments in the history of art from the 16th through the 20th centuries. This exhibition, organized by Peter C. Sutton, The Susan E. Lynch Executive  Director, and curated by Courtney Skipton Long, Zvi Grunberg Postdoctoral Fellow 2016/17 at the Bruce Museum, examines art historical themes including sculpted and painted portraits, narrative scenes and statues, landscapes, still lifes, and genre scenes.

For over a century, the collection at the Bruce Museum has grown steadily and been developed carefully through donations and purchases. After Robert Moffat Bruce bequeathed his home as well as a few portraits to the Town of Greenwich in 1908, the Bruce Museum hosted its first exhibition of art four years later. At the time, the Greenwich Press noted that it was a welcome change to see “a long gallery hung with paintings from the best works of local artists.”

“In this latest exhibition of the Museum’s  artworks, we are especially pleased to be able to reveal for the first time some of the most recent additions to the Bruce collection,” remarked Sutton, “including the deftly sculpted bas-relief bronze of Robert Louis Stevenson by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, a fine coastal scene by Alfred Thomson Bricher, and a spring landscape by the Danish artist Peder Mørk Mønsted, which were purchased just a few months ago.”   

Canvas and Cast explores artists’ handling of different media – bronze, marble, oil, pastel, acrylic and collage – through examples of 16th-century Dutch portraiture, 19th-century American figural sculpture, academic style painting, and French and American landscapes from the turn of the 20th century.

Canvas and Cast: Highlights from the Bruce Museum’s Art Collection runs through June 11, 2017 and is generously supported by The Charles M. and Deborah G. Royce Exhibition Fund and the Connecticut Office of the Arts. 

Image: William Merritt Chase (American, 1849-1917), Young Girl, c. 1900. Oil on canvas, 30 x 25 in. Bruce Museum Collection 2002.31