Florence Griswold Museum

Henry Ward Ranger (1858–1916)
Willard Leroy Metcalf (1858–1925)
Robert William Vonnoh (1858–1933)
Frederick Childe Hassam (1859–1935)

Frank Vincent DuMond (1865–1951)
William Chadwick (1879–1962)
Matilda Browne (later Van Wyck; 1869–1947)

96 Lyme Street, Old Lyme, CT 06371

860-434-5542

ABOUT

The Florence Griswold Museum is a 12-acre site on the Lieutenant River in the historic town of Old Lyme offers visitors the opportunity to explore art, history, and nature in a New England village setting. The Museum’s cornerstone is the Florence Griswold House, restored the to its 1910 heyday as the boardinghouse for the Lyme art Colony. Between 1899 and the 1930s, over 135 American artists such as Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf boarded here – it was the center of Impressionism in America. Leading artists were invited to paint a panel on the walls or doors of the house. Over 43 panels adorn the house. There is no other room like it in America. In addition to the House, the Museum features a gallery for changing exhibitions of art and culture, education and landscape centers, a half-mile walking trail featuring gardens and river view, and a restored artist’s studio.

SPECIAL RESOURCES

“You should see [my studio] here, just the place for high thinking and low living.”

— Childe Hassam

Frederick Childe Hassam (1859–1935)

Childe Hassam is credited with bringing Impressionism to Old Lyme. Before Hassam, the Old Lyme artists painted in style known as Tonalism. When he arrived in 1903, he was painting in a robust Impressionistic manner, using bright, high-key colors and thick, short brushstrokes that seemed to flicker on the canvas. His painting style had changed while he was in Europe, clearly influenced by the work of Claude Monet and other French artists (he sublet a studio used by Auguste Renoir while in Paris). He took on stylistic characteristics of French art, but painted subjects that expressed his proud American identity. Rather than painting Parisian cafés, Hassam depicted New York (draped in American flags) and frequented northeastern art colonies where his images of flower-filled gardens and white churches became symbols of old New England charm. Hassam was born in Dorchester, MA and died in Easthampton, NY. He summered in Old Lyme from 1903 to around 1907.

_{“Miss Florence” in her Dining Room, Collection Lyme Historical Society Archives, Florence Griswold Museum.}

_{Lyme Art Colony artists playing horseshoes at Miss Florence Griswold’s boardinghouse. Photo credit Florence Griswold Museum.}

“So, you see, at first the artists adopted Lyme, then Lyme adopted the artists, and now, today, Lyme and art are synonymous.”

Florence Griswold, 1937

LEARN MORE

The Florence Griswold Museum site is inextricably linked with the lives of the artists who stayed at “Miss Florence’s” boardinghouse. It all began in 1899 with Tonalist artist Henry Ward Ranger, who, while searching for a location to establish an American art colony, investigated the quiet town of Old Lyme. Immediately smitten, Ranger wrote to his New York dealer: “I want to drive you around & see a little bit of this beautiful country, where pictures are made…”. Although Ranger was seen as the founder of the Lyme Art Colony, it was Childe Hassam who, in 1903, led other artists into giving an American twist to a new style of art – Impressionism. The site has been called the “Home of American Impressionism,” in good measure because of Miss Florence’s gracious hospitality. The artists not only had room and board, but a constant source of subject material. From Miss Florence’s gardens and grounds, weathered farmhouses and white clapboard churches to livestock grazing in a neighbor’s pasture, there was never a shortage of places to set up their easels.

Visitors often remark that they feel Miss Florence would “be proud” of her eponymous cultural destination. Over the course of decades staff and trustees worked to reunite her property that was divided after her death. In 2017, the last few acres were purchased. Now Museum visitors stroll the perimeter of the property on the Robert F. Schumann Artists’ Trail, wandering a variety of terrain using the River, Hedgerow, River, and Garden Walks. They pass the 10,000 square foot state-of-the-art exhibition, collection storage, and study facility – the Robert and Nancy Krieble Gallery, completed in 2002. Other facilities include the Hartman Education Center, constructed in 1999 on the site of an original barn; the Rafal Landscape Center, a renovated barn where visitors learn about the landscape’s cultural importance as an inspirational place for American artists to live and work; and the c.1920 William Chadwick Studio, moved to the site in 1992 and restored as an example of a Lyme Art Colony artist studio.

In 2001 the Museum’s was given the remarkable 190-piece American art collection of The Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company. Paired with its preeminent Lyme Art Colony Collection, the Museum boasts an exceptional collection of American art from the 18th to the 20th centuries.

It may have been financial necessity that forced Miss Florence to open her ancestral home to boarders, but the relationships built here were far from merely transactional. Friendships developed and deepened, love blossomed, and Old Lyme became known as an “arts town,” a title it holds high today.

IN COLLABORATION WITH THE NATIONAL TRUST