Old Lyme: Where American Impressionism Took Root
Connecticut
Old Lyme, where the Connecticut River meets Long Island Sound, was a prosperous shipbuilding and sea-captain town through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By nineteen hundred it was in quiet decline, which made it cheap, and attractive to painters. Florence Griswold, daughter of a shipping family fallen on hard times, began taking in artists as boarders at her family's Georgian mansion.
What started as a practical arrangement became the Lyme Art Colony, an important center of American Impressionism. Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf, and dozens of others painted the salt marshes and river light from her porch and fields. They left paintings on the dining room panels as payment for board.
Florence's house is now the Florence Griswold Museum, and the panels remain in place, a permanent record of the summer a dying village became a home for an American art movement.
