 |
Florence Griswold Museum |
|
|
During the late 1800s and early 1900s Old Lyme CT became a summer art colony favored by painters. The less wealthy boarded in the fine old (1817) mansion of Miss Florence Griswold on Lyme Street. It's now a fine small museum. |
||
|
|
|
Miss Griswold's house at 96 Lyme Street, a late-Georgian mansion built in 1817, is also home to the Lyme Historical Society. American Impressionists whom Miss Griswold admired, including Charles Ebert, Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalfe, Henry Ward Ranger, and Guy and Carleston Wiggins, decorated many of the mansion's walls and doors with their work—sometimes in lieu of rent! Visit the first-floor rooms where Miss Florence's artist guests used to paint. Upstairs are galleries concentrating on the works of this "Lyme School" of American Impressionism, and on changing exhibits, including New England furnishings and decorative arts. Behind the fine old Georgian mansion is a modern museum building of aluminum, steel and glass that holds many more works. From I-95, take Exit 70 ("Old Lyme") and follow the many signs to the Florence Griswold Museum. |
|
Above, Miss Griswold's Lyme Street mansion, now the Florence Griswold Museum and the headquarters of the Lyme Historical Society, and a museum of American Impressionist painting. Below, the modern museum building behind the mansion.
|
|
|
||||
|
|
