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Florence Griswold, the daughter of Robert Harper Griswold, a prosperous sea captain, and Helen Powers Griswold, was born on Christmas morning, 1850. As one of Old Lyme’s oldest and richest families, the Griswolds enjoyed a cultivated and privileged life until economic difficulties changed the family’s fortunes. Helen Griswold decided to convert the family home to a finishing school for young ladies. The Griswold Home School for Girls opened in 1878, and Florence would teach there along with her mother and two sisters. Throughout her life, Florence Griswold would continue to confront financial difficulties, and by the late 1890s, she found herself alone on the family homestead. She transformed the school into a boarding house, renting rooms to boarders for $7 per week.

In 1899, Henry Ward Ranger, a painter recently returned from Europe, arrived in Old Lyme and found it an ideal place to establish a new center of American art. He settled at Griswold’s boarding house and the Old Lyme Art Colony was born. Over the next decade, Griswold hosted artists drawn to the allure of Connecticut’s picturesque rural setting, and her home became the center for America’s Impressionist artists, leading some to label Old Lyme the Giverny of America. The Griswold home housed 15 or so artists who traveled to Old Lyme in the summer months to paint en plein air. Griswold provided lodging and meals, but also emotional and artistic support. Regular boarders included both beginning and well-established artists. William Henry Howe, for example, was just starting out while Matilda Browne was already well-known and Childe Hassam quite famous.

Throughout her life, Griswold was involved in civic affairs and was an active member of the National Society of Colonial Dames of America in the State of Connecticut. In Old Lyme, she donated a portion of her land to the Lyme Art Association so that a gallery could be opened. She became the gallery’s first manager and received a portion of all proceeds. Nonetheless, she faced constant debt because of the credit she extended to her boarders. In the mid-1930s, in failing health and facing major financial difficulties, she was forced to consider selling the home to repay her own creditors. As a result, some of the more successful artists whose careers she had helped foster organized the Florence Griswold Association to purchase the property and turn it into a museum. Their efforts, however, ultimately failed, and Judge Robert McCurdy Marsh purchased the property instead, granting Griswold the right to continue living in the home until her death. It was in her family home that Florence Griswold died in December 1937. Her New York Times obituary noted “this generous spirit survives; and not in the Griswold house alone, but as part of no inconsiderable chapter in the history of our native art.”

The Florence Griswold Association succeeded in purchasing the home and property from Judge Marsh in 1941, and in 1947 the Florence Griswold Museum opened to the public. Today the museum is an architectural treasure that occupies a unique place in the history of American Impressionism. It welcomes more than 40,000 visitors a year from around the world and continues to host both permanent and temporary exhibitions. The museum is a part of the Connecticut Women’s Heritage Trail and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1993.

Related Links:

Florence Griswold Museum

Complete Biography of Miss Florence

Old Lyme Historical Society