Florence Griswold

Florence Ann Griswold ( born December 25, 1850 † December 6, 1937 ) was an American teacher in Old Lyme, Connecticut. After 1899 she became the landlady and director of the summer school to the core of there artists colony establishing itself around the Tonalisten Henry Ward Ranger and from 1903 to the Impressionists Childe Hassam.

Life

Florence Griswold was the youngest daughter of the ship's master, Robert Harper Griswold. In 1878 she opened with her mother and her two sisters, the Griswold Home School for Girls and participated in this for 14 years as a teacher. After her parents and her sister Louise had died, were Florence and the sister Adele back in a difficult financial situation and decide to include guests in Griswoldhaus.

1899 was the American painter Henry Ward Ranger in search of a place where he wanted to build a residence on the model of the French Barbizon artists' colony, to Old Lyme. He founded his colony at this place and made him an enclave of Tonalism. Florence Griswold built their house in order to summer school for artists. Old Lyme was subsequently to American Barbizon and Fontainebleau in the Connecticut.

1903 was the then already known Childe Hassam to the place, though he actually lived in Cos Cob, Old Lyme and coined as a paradise for the American Impressionism. Hassam was a regular in the summer to 1912, from 1905 Willard Metcalf was also a guest at Florence Griswold, who was known as Miss Florence. He painted the painting in 1906 and May Night wore on the Griswold House and Miss Florence firmly. When he want to give her the picture, she refused because she regarded it as one of his masterpieces. The following year, the picture won the gold medal in the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, where it hangs today.

In the following years, regularly hired art students and artists at Florence Griswold one. Other better-known guests were about the sisters Lydia and Breta Longacre or Edmund W. Graecen. From 1914 he lived Wilson Irvine in the colony. Also, the first wife of President Woodrow Wilson, Ellen Wilson was, as a student guest of Miss Florence and both were good friends. 1914 Florence Griswold lived as at the wedding of the daughter of the president Jessie Sayer Wilson.

In 1921, Florence Griswold was the first director of the Gallery of the Lyme Art Association 's, their house was rebuilt in the Florence Griswold Museum, in which both art exhibition as well as exhibitions of historical objects are found to this day.