Bush-Holley House: The Cos Cob Art Colony
Near Bridgeport Stamford, Connecticut
This gambrel-roofed house in the Cos Cob section of Greenwich was built in stages beginning around seventeen twenty-eight and became the unlikely center of one of the first American Impressionist art colonies. Beginning in eighteen ninety, painter John Twachtman invited students and fellow artists to board at the house, then run as an inn by the Holley family. Childe Hassam, J.
Alden Weir, and dozens of other artists came and painted the harbor, the docks, and the light off the Mianus River. The colony that gathered here helped establish American Impressionism as a distinct movement, separate from its French origins. The house is now the home of the Greenwich Historical Society and a National Historic Landmark, its parlors and outbuildings largely intact from the colonial and Gilded Age eras when artists crowded every room.
