Bruce Museum Makes New Additions to Permanent Collection

Greenwich, CT - The Bruce Museum in Greenwich, CT, welcomed the New Year by making a number of significant additions to its permanent collection.

At a meeting in late December, the Museum’s Collections Committee, chaired by Lynne Pasculano, reviewed an array of proposed gifts. True to its original charter, the Museum accessioned 24 separate gifts totaling 202 objects from the fields of art, history, and natural history to complement its long- and short-term exhibitions.

Among a number of fine works of art acquired in 2018 by noted artists such as Alfred Thompson Bricher, Emil Carlsen, Elmer MacRae, and Emilio Sánchez-Perrier were two landscapes by American painter Frank Vincent DuMond that were donated by Jill Warren. A native of Rochester, NY, DuMond was an important American Impressionist and popular instructor at the Art Students League in New York. His students included Norman Rockwell and Georgia O’Keeffe. For decades, DuMond also taught outdoor art classes in Old Lyme, CT, and on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia.

The DuMond landscapes will be on view during the exhibition, Buried Treasures of the Silk Road, which features the extraordinary collection of Chinese tomb sculpture from the Jane and Fred Brooks Collection, including 18 figurines and objects that were also among the artworks gifted to the Museum in 2018.

Seven bills of First Issue (1862-1863) postage, or fractional currency – paper coins issued by the federal government in response to coin hoarding during the American Civil War – were donated by Charles and Jeanne Howes, niece and nephew of Paul G. Howes, one of the founding curators of the Bruce Museum. The antique bills were originally lent to the Museum by Howes’ mother, Mrs. L. Townsend Howes, for a 1927 exhibition, Civil War Shinplasters. The term suggests the money had less value than the paper bandages used by soldiers to protect their shins from chaffing boots.

A mounted Adélie penguin, a native of Antarctica that builds its nest with stones, was a gift of SeaWorld Entertainment of San Diego, CA. The penguin will be among the specimens featured in the exhibition space of the enlarged Permanent Science Gallery envisioned as part of the New Bruce expansion and renovation campaign currently under way.

Since the Bruce Museum’s founding more than a century ago, the community, through its generosity, has built the Museum collection to more than 20,000 objects. The Museum building and its collections are resources owned by the Town of Greenwich and held in trust for the people of the Town by a separate, privately funded 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, Bruce Museum, Inc.

Attached are high-res images of the two landscape paintings by American Impressionist Frank Vincent DuMond (American 1865-1951), Upper Margaree and Margaree Forks.