Lyme Art Association, 1921

     The early Lyme artists who boarded with Miss Florence Griswold held their first exhibition at the Phoebe Griffin Noyes Library on August 27th and 28th 1902. The exhibitions became a summer tradition and the library continued hosting them until 1920. In fact the first shows were actually benefits for the library which needed funds to buy books. According to the newspaper account of the time, “One scheme after another was tried until it occured to someone to ask the artists who spend their summers in town to exhibit their paintings.” In that wonderful year of 1902 a Hartford Courant reporter noted that the ladies of the library were in a “joyous frame of mind as the receipts at the door were $180.”

 
Lyme Art Association, 2021

     The shows received good press notices and were a success from the start. Old Lyme was on the map and making a name for itself as an American art colony, and with the arrival of Childe Hassam in 1903 the aesthetic of the group shifted to the new fangled impressionism.
     As the exhibition period expanded and as more and more artists displayed their works, the group began to dream about its own gallery. Many of the artists settled permanently in Old Lyme and, in 1914, they formed the Lyme Art Association. For a small sum, Miss Florence deeded a portion of her property to LAA and the artists began to raise money. Charles Platt, one of the artists who was also an architect, donated his services and designed the building. In its review of the gallery opening, August 6, 1921, The New York Times praised it “as an embodiment of art in harmony of its natural surroundings.” Miss Florence became the gallery’s first manager, and remained so until her death in 1937.
     A century has elapsed since the opening of the Lyme Art Association gallery. Looking back at that kinder and gentler era, we think about how much the world has changed. But it is heartwarming to realize that some things have not changed. Old Lyme is still the beautiful village that the artists first saw and every June the mountain laurel still blooms. And, more than one hundred years after the first exhibition, the artists still set up their easels around town, still join LAA, still display their work in its historic galleries and visitors still pass Florence Griswold’s desk on their way in to see each new exhibit.