Miss Florence and the American Giverny

At the edge of Old Lyme, where the Lieutenant River meets the Connecticut, there is a late Georgian mansion that became, in the first decades of the twentieth century, the unlikely headquarters of American Impressionism. Its unlikely impresario was a genteel, chronically underfunded woman named Florence Griswold, and what she created here was one of the great artist communities in American history.

Florence Griswold was the daughter of a sea captain, raised in the house her family had occupied since the early nineteenth century. By the eighteen nineties she was unmarried, middle-aged, and running short of money. Her solution was to open the house to paying boarders. In eighteen ninety-nine, a painter named Henry Ward Ranger arrived, found the Connecticut River light extraordinary, and began recruiting other painters to come and stay.

Then, in nineteen oh three, Childe Hassam arrived. Hassam was already one of America's most accomplished Impressionists, trained partly in Paris, committed to the broken-color technique he had absorbed from the French masters. He found Old Lyme irresistible: the marshes, the elms, the old Congregational church on the green. He painted it all in thick, high-key Impressionist strokes and he stayed, season after season.

What Hassam and the other artists could not always offer Miss Florence in rent, they offered in paint. A tradition developed of artists decorating panels directly onto the walls and doors of the house. Over the years, forty-one panels accumulated, making the interior of the Griswold House the most complete surviving record of an American art colony. Old Lyme became known as the American Giverny, a comparison to Monet's village in Normandy that the artists themselves encouraged.

About two hundred painters passed through the colony between eighteen ninety-nine and the nineteen thirties. Florence Griswold died in nineteen thirty-seven, and the house was transformed into the museum you can visit today. The forty-one panels are still on the walls.