Tom and Cynthia Sculco bought their first American Impressionist painting about 40 years ago. They were building careers in New York, he as a surgeon and she as a nursing professor, but both had grown up in Westerly near the Pawcatuck River, and the sunlit coastal scenes reminded them of home.
“We saw these paintings and we said, ‘Okay, let’s put them on the wall!'” Tom Sculco told Antiques and The Arts Weekly last year. “Then, all of a sudden, 40 years later, we’ve got 300 paintings!”
Those paintings are now the core of the Westerly Museum of American Impressionism, which marked its first anniversary this fall. To celebrate, the museum has published a 184-page hardcover book, “The Westerly Museum of American Impressionism,” written by director Catherine E. Shotick. It went on sale Nov. 5 at the museum and online, South County Star reported.
A nursing home site on the river
The couple had talked about a museum for about a decade before a site came open. It was a former nursing home on Watch Hill Road that closed after the pandemic, on land overlooking Babcock Cove and the Pawcatuck. They kept the foundation and footprint and built everything else new.
“The beauty of the museum is you look at a seascape and then you look out the window and you see the same scene,” Tom Sculco said.
Cynthia Sculco, who describes herself as a 13th-generation Rhode Islander, said the layout borrowed an idea from the Gulbenkian museum in Lisbon, where big windows look out onto gardens. The couple hired Centerbrook Architects & Planners after asking the former director of the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme who had worked on that building. Deslandes Construction of Warwick built it.
The result is a one-story, 25,000-square-foot museum with 11 galleries. It opened Oct. 9, 2025, and drew about 1,300 visitors in its first 16 days. Visitors move through rooms organized by the New England art colonies, starting in Old Lyme and moving to Cape Ann, Ogunquit and the Boston area, before reaching a tall gallery of about 35 harbor and boating scenes and a final room that opens onto the river.
Their name stays off the building
The couple decided early that the museum would carry the town’s name rather than their own. “We felt the community’s name should be on the museum, not ours,” Tom Sculco said. The directorship does carry their names: Shotick, a former curator in Chicago and Oklahoma City, holds the title of Cynthia D. and Thomas P. Sculco Director.
About 150 paintings, roughly half the collection, are on view at any time. The walls include Childe Hassam, John Singer Sargent, John Henry Twachtman and Edmund C. Tarbell, but the founders have made a point of showing artists most visitors have never heard of, many of them women. Tom Sculco’s favorites include Louise Upton Brumback’s beach scene “Good Harbor Beach” and Charles Courtney Curran’s “Delphiniums Blue – No. 2.” Cynthia Sculco pointed to Jane Peterson’s “Dancing Water.”
“They’re as good as any one of the top 10,” Tom Sculco said of the lesser-known painters. “They’re underappreciated, and most people don’t know anything about them.”
The first year
The new book, printed by Puritan Press, has 80 color plates from the collection and tells the story of how the Sculcos’ collection turned into an institution. “It really feels like the first step in establishing the museum in the wider world,” Shotick said.
The museum added a visiting lecture series last summer. Its current exhibition, “When Her Eye Met the Sea: Women of the Ogunquit Art Colony,” shows work by six women painters from the Maine colony, on loan from the Darin R. Leese Family Collection.
The museum is at 79 Watch Hill Road and is open Thursday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tickets, memberships and the book are available at wmairi.org.
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