Florence Griswold Museum

Around the turn of the 20th century, Old Lyme became home to one of the most important art colonies in the United States. Painters drawn to the New England light, the river, and the countryside boarded at Florence Griswold's house, forming a community that worked side by side and shaped the American branch of Impressionism.

Florence Griswold herself was the heart of the colony. Heir to a fine but financially strained family home, she took in the artists as boarders, and her generosity and hospitality created the conditions in which the colony flourished. The painters who stayed there included leading figures of American Impressionism, and their time in Old Lyme produced a body of work that helped define the movement in this country.

The most extraordinary feature of the museum is the house itself. Over the years, the resident artists decorated the wooden panels of the doors and walls, especially in the dining room, with their own paintings, turning the boardinghouse into a collaborative canvas. These painted panels survive in place, so visitors can stand in the same rooms and see art made by the colony directly on the architecture.

This gives the Florence Griswold house a rare intimacy. Rather than viewing paintings hung in galleries, you experience the artists' work embedded in the very rooms where they ate, argued, and lived, a physical record of the community that gathered there.

The grounds run down to the Lieutenant River, and the museum has restored the gardens that the artists knew, so the landscape they painted is once again a living part of the site. Strolling the gardens and riverbank in the growing season, it is easy to see what drew the painters to this spot.

Alongside the historic house, a purpose-built gallery holds the museum's collection of American Impressionist and related paintings, allowing the story that begins in the house to continue with finished works on the walls. The pairing of authentic setting and curated collection is what makes the museum so complete.

The museum's setting on Lyme Street places it in one of Connecticut's prettiest colonial villages, a street of white clapboard houses, old churches, and mature trees near the mouth of the Connecticut River. The village's beauty is itself part of why the artists came.

From Old Lyme, the beaches of the Connecticut shoreline and the river towns of the lower valley are within easy reach, so a visit to the museum fits naturally into a broader tour of the coast. Recognized as a National Historic Landmark, the Florence Griswold Museum stands as the essential starting point for understanding American Impressionism.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.