Willard Metcalf: The Old Lyme Colony

"Kalmia" by Willard Metcalf

"The painter Henry Ward Ranger started the Old Lyme Colony. He was enchanted with the village from his first visit in 1899, and immediately made plans to establish a new Barbizon at this juncture of the Connecticut River and Long Island Sound. Old Lyme is situation in one of the most beautiful areas in southern New England. Its white houses lining the old Boston Post Road look as though time had stopped about 1900, and was eminently paintable, as were some of the other towns nearby. 

Old Lyme was a bit down-at-the-heels when Ranger got there, because the ship-building industry had gone elsewhere, diminishing the once-great prosperity of the town. The Griswold family, for instance, was an old, distinguished New England family fallen on hard times, and Miss Florence Griswold began to take in summer boarders, among them Henry Ward Ranger, who felt her late Georgian house was just the place to establish his colony of American landscapists. 

Fortunately Miss Griswold agreed with him, for Miss Griswold and her house, with its grand portico and spacious grounds, became central to the founding and development of the colony at Old Lyme. The house, now the Florence Griswold Museum and Lyme Historical Society on Lyme Street, soon became headquarters for painters of the Barbizon persuasion led by Ranter - until Childe Hassam came to town in 1903, with all the paraphernalia of the Impressionist style. Hassam also brought with him his friend and fellow Impressionist Walter Griffin and encourage Metcalf to join them. Metcalf represnted neutral territory in his pursuit of a middle course as a kind of latter-day American Bastien-LePage. But his work had an Impressionist edge, and soon the colony became 'Impressionized.' Henry Ward Ranger moved elsewhere." 

To be continued

(Excerpt from "Sunlight and Shadow: The Life and Art of Willard L. Metcalf" by  Elizabeth de Veer and Richard J. Boyle.)