TOM Butterfield is on a mission. The founder and director of Masterworks, together with assistant director Elise Outerbridge, is in the process of creating a museum for the Bermuda-focused artwork they describe as "Bermuda's only portable national treasures".

Mr. Butterfield, 54, explains: "We have great buildings and the World Heritage Site at St. George's, but the Masterworks art collection really does represent a unique national treasure and we want to make it available to everyone in Bermuda."

Mr. Butterfield exhibits the kind of determination common to collectors. He recalled an occasion when he was offered a Bermuda painting and a Renoir. "I told the fellow who was offering to send us these pieces that he should keep the Renoir, which he found amusing at first. In the end, he sent both, and we immediately put the Renoir into storage, because it was of no use to us."

Bermuda has famously inspired artists and writers for centuries, as readers of Mark Twain and listeners to John Lennon's music are only too well aware. The list of artists who found something magical in Bermuda is a long one, led by Georgia O'Keeffe, Winslow Homer and Albert Gleizes, the cubist painter whose studies of Government House Masterworks is slowly collecting. Masterworks has just landed a fourth Gleizes, on loan.

THE Masterworks Art Centre is being developed in the Arrowroot Factory, behind Camden, the Premier's official residence in the Botanical Gardens. The new Centre, which will incorporate the Arrowroot Factory, is a priority for Mr. Butterfield and Ms Outerbridge.

"Our goal is to create one of the greatest little museums in the world," Mr. Butterfield said, "to do justice to the astonishing art that Bermuda has inspired."

Premier Jennifer Smith, an amateur painter when she is not running the country, was the prime mover behind the decision to allow Masterworks to take a 21-year renewable lease on the building that used to house the butter sculptures at the annual Ag Show.

Ms Smith had been a volunteer and sat on the Masterworks membership committee, and in July 2000, she introduced legislation into the House of Assembly to give Masterworks a permanent home. The bill was passed unopposed.

"The power of the collection would be seriously diluted if it were spread all over the place," Mr. Butterfield said. "Everyone should have the opportunity to see this collection, to have a place where they can discuss it and raise the level of their connection with it. Bermuda now has such an environment, and our job is to shape it in such a way as to maximise its value for all of Bermuda."

Although plans for the Centre are still "fluid", some of the layout has been finalised. Mr. Butterfield and Ms Outerbridge are working from an office upstairs, and a meeting room is in use below them, next to the rose garden, although the final use of that room may yet be changed.

"We would like to discover the best use for the space that we have, which may come from practice rather than theory," Mr. Butterfield explained.

However the space is finally utilised, one thing is sure: a very important part of Bermuda's cultural history is in the process of finding a permanent home that will do justice to its importance. If only Renoir had visited Bermuda . . .