A regional museum expands - Current and Coming - Brief Article

Magazine Antiques, July, 2002 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

Old Lyme, Connecticut, on the Lieutenant River, was the site of an important art colony for American impressionist painters. It has also inspired artists of many other kinds thanks to its natural beauty. The art colony grew up around the boarding house owned by Florence Griswold and quickly drew artists such as John Henry Twachtman, J. Alden Weir, Willard Leroy Metcalf, and Childe Hassam.

The Florence Griswold Museum was established with the aim of collecting works by members of the Lyme Art Colony and has grown to encompass eleven acres surrounding the Griswold House, which was built in 1817. The museum has recently expanded with the construction of a ninety-five-hundred-square-foot exhibition gallery named for Robert and Nancy Krieble. This structure was designed by Centerbrook Architects and also includes storage space for the collection, visitor amenities, and a new museum shop. The inaugural exhibition, which opens on July 2 and will be on view through June 22, 2003, celebrates the recent gift of a comprehensive collection of paintings by artists who lived or worked in Connecticut, which was assembled by the Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company (see The Magazine ANTIQUES, November 2001, p. 590). The exhibition, entitled The American Artist in Connecticut: The Legacy of the Hartford Steam Boiler Collection, includes nearly 100 works selected from the donation of 157 paint ings, 31 works on paper, and 2 sculptures.

The Hartford Steam Boiler Collection was the brainchild of Wilson Wilde, the president and chief executive officer of the company between 1971 and 1994, who set out to purchase paintings and decorative arts as a way of providing employees with a well-appointed working environment. He and a committee of three others initially confined their search to decorative arts with a Connecticut connection. (These are still owned by the company now a subsidiary of American International Group.) But when the corporation moved to new offices in 1983, the committee expanded its agenda to include paintings. By 1984 the firm had acquired twelve canvases. The next year twenty-four were purchased, and these were augmented by twelve examples in 1986. By 1989, when the Wads-worth Atheneum in Hartford had a loan exhibition of the company's collection, the display comprised eighty paintings and seventeen pieces of furniture.

Today every type of American painting is represented in the collection--portraits, genre works, figurative canvases, trompe l'oeil, miniatures, marine views, and landscapes, all of them dating from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century. It is a marvelous survey of the history of American art and Connecticut's prominent role in it.

A catalogue of the exhibition, written by Jeffrey A. Anderson, the director of the Florence Griswold Museum, with contributions by the consulting curator, Hildy Cummings, is available by telephoning 800-288-2129.