Enthusiasm for the art of the present has a long history in Greenwich. Local gallery owner Ron Cavalier remembers visiting, as a teenager in the 1960s, the Rodin and Matisse sculptures on the sprawling estate of the financier Joseph Hirshhorn (1899–1981), before they and other top-notch examples were moved to Washington, D.C., to form the permanent collection at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

Some longtime residents prefer to own more traditional art. Barbara Newington, the great-granddaughter of the Hudson River School painter Jasper Cropsey, has amassed a collection of that artist’s pictures. In recent years, she has loaned some of her Cropseys, as well as a dreamy female portrait by the 19th-century Academic French painter Adolphe-William Bouguereau, to the Bruce.

Over three decades, Suzanne Hascoe and her late husband, Norman, acquired some 200 works of modernist Czech art along with pieces of American furniture and 17th-century Dutch paintings. As some of the town’s most energetic arts supporters, their names are on many loans to the Bruce and on its long-running lecture series.

"The Old Guard" 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.