Peter Sutton, the director of the town-owned Bruce Museum, is Greenwich’s quiet but powerful art influencer. His institution benefits greatly from being smack in the middle of what he calls “the highest concentration of art collectors in the world.” The 100-year-old museum has mounted six shows drawn from local holdings, such as the collection of Suzanne and the late Norman Hascoe, which comprises Czech modernist art and Dutch Old Masters. An exhibition of sculpture owned by area residents is currently in the works. Ripe for the picking are one couple’s 30-plus outdoor pieces that include a mother and child by Henry Moore and works by Lynn Chadwick, Keith Haring and Barbara Hepworth.

These shows, according to Sutton, are irresistible for an obvious reason: Everyone wants to know what treasures are hidden inside those well-shuttered houses. “Greenwich is unlike any place in the world,” says Sutton, who served as the director of Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art and was an Old Masters specialist at Christie’s before coming to the Bruce. “It’s not just that it’s affluent. The people are also well traveled. They have very high expectations of the museum. We don’t have much of a permanent collection”—it contains roughly 2,300 fine-art objects—“but our neighbors have great permanent collections.”

"The Bruce Museum of Arts and Sciences" originally appeared in the July 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's July 2008 Table of Contents.