Bush-Holley House, Greenwich Historical Society


47 Strickland Road, Cos Cob, CT 06807

203-869-6899

Greenwich Historical Society, located in Cos Cobb, CT, is home to the National Historic Landmark Bush-Holley House, rotating exhibition galleries and a wide variety of lectures and programs. The docent-led tours of Bush-Holley House explore the history of the two families who give the House its name: the mercantile Bush family, who built the House and lived their during the founding of the United States; and the Holley family, who ran it as a boarding house that hosted the Cos Cob Art Colony. More artworks created by artists associated with the Art Colony – including Elmer Livingston MacRae, John Henry Twachtman, Childe Hassam, and Ernest Lawson – can be viewed in the Permanent Collections Gallery. Visitors can also research in the Library & Archives, enjoy a picnic among the historic gardens and visit the Museum Store.

Elmer Livingston MacRae relaxes with a pipe in his studio, surrounded by portraits he had made of his wife, Emma Constant Holley MacRae. Photograph courtesy of Greenwich Historical Society.

Born in New York City in 1875, Elmer Livingston MacRae joined the Art Students League of New York in 1895 where he attended classes lead by American Impressionist painter John Henry Twachtman. MacRae first came to the Holley House in Cos Cob, Connecticut for Twachtman’s summer class in 1896, where he fell in love with the daughter of the boarding house proprietors, Emma Constant Holley. Together, the newlywed MacRaes took over the running of the boarding house, which continued to be a bustling hub of artistic activity until 1920. In his prolific productivity, MacRae was also experimental, working with pastels, watercolor, wood carving and furniture making over the course of his career. MacRae was an instrumental early member of the Pastellists, as well as the Association of American Painters and Sculptors. As treasurer of the AAPS, MacRae was one of the primary organizers of the Armory Show of 1913.

Back of the Old House by Elmer Livingston MacRae, 1910. Oil on canvas, 25 x 30 inches. Greenwich Historical Society, Gift of Shirley Fogwell. Photo credit: Paul Mutino.
The profusion of lilacs planted along the front of the Bush-Holley House date to the Art Colony era, when they provided shade and inspiration for the artists. Photograph courtesy of Greenwich Historical Society.
Elmer Livingston MacRae was influenced by Japanese art and aesthetics like so many of his contemporaries. Photograph courtesy of Greenwich Historical Society.

For more than half a century, from 1896 until his death in 1953, the Holley House was home and inspiration to Elmer Livingston MacRae. He came to Cos Cob as one of John Henry Twachtman’s summer students for painting classes in the American Impressionist style. Together with other Art Students’ League members, MacRae boarded the train and escaped the heat of his lifelong home in New York City for the cool breezes of Cos Cob Harbor. Before the summer was over, MacRae was in love with the place. Before the first frost, he was also in love with the innkeepers’ daughter, Emma Constant Holley. They were married in 1900 and together continued to attract artists and writers to “the Old House,” today known as the Bush-Holley House.

MacRae found plenty to paint in Cos Cob: his wife and twin daughters, the profusion of flowers from their gardens, the shipyard and the village green. When he made the transition from Impressionism to Post-Impressionism and finally to the Arts and Crafts movement, MacRae simply treated his familiar subjects in fresh ways. On home ground, the typically reticent artist was surprisingly gregarious, playing host to an extended family of fellow artists who boarded at the house for weeks or months at a time.

The Cos Cob Art Colony, which evolved out of the early summer classes taught by Twachtman and called the Holley House its home, exposed MacRae to established artists like Childe Hassam, J. Alden Weir, Robert Reid, and Leonard Ochtman. Other students inspired MacRae as well; he admired particularly the work of his friend and fellow student, the Japanese artist Genjiro Yeto. MacRae’s watercolor paintings of flowers, which still decorate Bush-Holley House today, are strongly reminiscent of Yeto’s works.

While the subjects of Cos Cob constituted his life’s work, MacRae was also deeply interested in the future of artists and the art world more broadly. He worked energetically on two significant artists’ organizations, the Pastellists and the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, which mounted the famous Armory Show of 1913 and for which MacRae served as the treasurer. MacRae’s body of work documents a rapidly changing world: the increased urbanization and suburban development of the region, the emergence of groundbreaking modern art movements, and a yearning for a slower, gentler era. The Bush-Holley House continues to preserve a window into MacRae’s life and time, an impression of a different world.