Old Lyme art colony

The Old Lyme art colony of Old Lyme, Connecticut was established in 1899 by American painter Henry Ward Ranger, and was in its time the most famous art colony in the United States, and the first to adopt Impressionism.

[1] Ranger began his American equivalent to the French Barbizon school, a similar seasonal retreat from less bucolic communities, in the modest boarding house of Florence Griswold, bringing fellow artists Lewis Cohen, Henry Rankin Poore, Louis Paul Dessar, and William Henry Howe in 1900.

The group came to be dominated, socially and artistically, by Childe Hassam after his appearance in 1903.

[3] Many significant American Impressionist paintings of the era depict buildings in and around Old Lyme, notably the Old Lyme Congregational Church, painted by Hassam and others.

This was the first contemporary painting purchased by the Corcoran Gallery of Art.