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This post is available as a video at https://youtu.be/EctiIFjpxsw.

In the early 1800s the town of Old Lyme, on the Connecticut River near Long Island Sound, was a prosperous shipbuilding center. But when steam-powered ships became common, the town turned into an agricultural backwater. By the 1890s, Florence Griswold (1850-1937) was taking in boarders to pay for the upkeep of the large home inherited from her sea-faring father. Henry Ward Ranger, who arrived in 1899, thought the Griswold home would be the perfect place for an art colony. (Another artist’s colony was growing up in the 1890s around Augustus Saint Gaudens’s summer home in Cornish, New Hampshire.) The next summer, Ranger returned to Old Lyme with a group of friends.

The artist’s colony in the Griswold home lasted for about two decades. Among those who spent time at the “School of Lyme” were Childe Hassam, Edward Charles Volkert, and Willard Metcalf. Although residents came and went, Miss Florence fostered a sense of community by allowing them veto power over new artist-boarders.

The Griswold House was nearly razed during the Great Depression, but was saved by the newly formed Florence Griswold Association. It was opened as a museum in 1947. The FGA has gradually refurnished the house and acquired 12 acres of land, room for additional gallery spaces and some gardens and walking trails. It’s a lovely place to spend a summer day.

The Griswold home’s formal parlor became the largest guest room. Another guest room was on the first floor, five more on the second (now a series of galleries), and number of smaller rooms on the third. In all, Miss Florence had space for 16 boarders.

After dinner, the artist-boarders congregated in the parlor, playing card games and performing plays. Occasionally they played the “wiggle game”, in which each artist had to try to incorporate three random, wiggly lines into a complete, humorous drawing.

The Griswold House’s most unusual feature is a series of paintings done on the first-floor doors and on the walls of the dining room. It was an honor to be invited by Miss Florence to paint one of these panels.

The doors and walls of the dining room bear 38 painted panels by 33 artists, with subjects ranging from Lyme to Venice, Spain, and New York. In this corner of the dining room: William Howe Foote’s Florence Griswold House by Moonlight, 1905; Bruce Crane’s December Morn, 1921; Thomas Watson Ball’s Chinese Twilight.

Below: Arthur Heming, Shooting Death’s Rapids, 1906. Heming (1870-1940), a Canadian painter and novelist, was known as the “Chronicler of the North”. Being color blind, he painted mostly in black and white.

Below the dining-room mantelpiece: Henry Rankin Poore, The Fox Chase, 1901-1905. Reading left to right: the fox, the dogs, and then an array of painters caricatured as dropping their work to join the hunt. Toward the right are the painters’ staples: a bottle of varnish and a nearly empty bottle of rye whiskey. At the far right is the Griswold House. Poore changed the painting several times to reflect which artists were at the boardinghouse. The final version includes 24 figures, all of whom are meticulously identified in the Griswold’s literature.

Soon the dining-room panels were so renowned that Miss Florence was leading tours of them. She concluded with a genteel sales pitch in the hall, which served as a make-shift gallery for the boarding-house artists.

Painter William Chadwick (1879-1962) was a resident of Old Lyme. His studio, moved to the Griswold property in 1992, shows a typical working environment for painters of the early 1900s. Although the Impressionists championed painting on-site outdoors (“en plein air”), many painters eventually used excursions only to make sketches, and completed their works in the controlled environment of a studio. Miss Florence rented private studios to her boarders for as little as $5 per month.

Next week: a handful of paintings from the second-floor galleries at the Griswold Museum.

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• The Florence Griswold Museum is open Tuesday through Sunday. The property includes walking paths, gardens, a gallery with modern art, and a small cafe.
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