Bruce Museum

The Bruce Museum’s art collection consists of paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, photographs, multimedia compositions, and decorative arts.

Painting and Sculpture
In 1912 the Bruce Museum opened with an exhibition by members of the Greenwich Society of Artists, which included Childe Hassam, Emil Carlsen, Leonard and Mina Fonda Ochtman, Elmer McRae among others. The Museum continued to host the Society’s exhibitions until 1926, and acquisitions from those shows form the nucleus of holdings in Cos Cob Impressionism. Subsequent acquisitions include paintings by American and European artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; among them are works by Jan Verhas, Alessandro Milesi, Ammi Phillips, Daniel Ridgway Knight, Francis Silva, Carl Rungius, Edward Henry Potthast, William Merritt Chase, John Twachtman and Theodore Robinson.

Sculpture includes nineteenth and twentieth-century work by Hiram Powers, Frederick MacMonnies and Auguste Rodin.

Works on Paper
Concurrent with the painting collection the Bruce Museum has acquired a sizeable collection of drawings and prints ranging from Leonard Ochtman to Robert Rauschenberg. The photography collection is growing rapidly thanks to generous recent gifts. Included here are works by Carl Mydans, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Larry Fink, Mike Disfarmer, Garry Winogrand and many others.

Decorative arts
Decorative arts collections include holdings in French art glass, American art pottery, and an extraordinary collection of highly decorative pipes — from Gustav Fischer Meerschaum to Staffordshire puzzle pipes.