Two Days of Light: The Bruce Museum’s Fine Arts Festival Finds Its Forty

By Elizabeth Barhydt

Every October, Greenwich rediscovers its appetite for looking. The Bruce Museum’s Fine Arts Festival, now in its forty-fourth year, returns as both a tradition and a gentle provocation: an open-air museum that lasts exactly one weekend. It’s juried, serious, and proudly unhurried. The atmosphere is friendly but not frivolous — fine art meets fall fair, with a chance of fried dough.

What began in the early 1980s as an experiment has become a fixture. The idea was simple: once a year, art should leave its walls and meet daylight. That impulse — civic, democratic, slightly romantic — belongs to the museum’s founding spirit. In 1908, Robert Moffat Bruce, a textile merchant with a philanthropic streak, donated his house to the town “for the use and benefit of the public.”