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Lyme in mind:
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A Collector Reflects: A light reception concludes the event. REGISTER for the event online.
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| 96 Lyme Street, Old Lyme, CT 06371 | 860-434-5542 phone | Open Tuesday - Saturday 10 - 5; Sunday 1 - 5 | ||
The Museum celebrates the promised gift of a significant collection of American Impressionist pictures by longtime trustee Clement C. Moore with an exhibition of the collection. Lyme in Mind: The Clement C. Moore Collection features major works by the most notable members of the Lyme Art Colony, including Childe Hassam, William Chadwick, Frank Vincent DuMond, Edmund Greacen, Harry Hoffman, Willard Metcalf, Ivan Olinsky, and Henry Ward Ranger. The paintings have never been shown together publicly. The collection conveys Moore’s personal and deeply felt appreciation for the Connecticut landscape, an affinity he shares with the Lyme Art Colony painters. “We are honored to share this private collection with the public,” remarked museum director Jeff Andersen. “It does a remarkable job of telling the story of the colony of artists who gathered in Old Lyme at the turn of the twentieth century.” 
Lyme in Mind offers viewers insight into the process of building a personal collection. Moore and his wife Elizabeth began to assemble their collection in the mid-1980s, when they lived in Stonington, Connecticut. They both had personal connections with the state. Elizabeth grew up in Connecticut and Clement’s father lived in Lyme. Clement’s affection for the woods and coastline of southeastern Connecticut, developed over years of exploring its forests and beaches, shaped his interest in depictions of the region from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “My wife and I both enjoy the outdoors—hiking, sailing, gardening, hunting—so we got to know and appreciate the local landscape that way. We’re drawn to landscape paintings in which the artist captures the essence of New England,” Moore says. The works he selected 
share a meditative tone that matches Moore’s own thoughtfulness about the landscape and the importance of place. It is the kinship Moore felt with Childe Hassam in their mutual embrace of the Connecticut landscape that initially inspired Moore to build a collection. In his first acquisition of an Old Lyme subject, Hassam’s Connecticut Hunting Scene, 1904, Moore recognized that he shared with Hassam a familiarity with the rocky, tree-studded hillsides of the region.
Moore’s collecting has also been informed by a desire to build a legacy for the Florence Griswold Museum, which is dedicated to preserving the heritage of the Lyme Art Colony once based at Florence Griswold’s boardinghouse in Old Lyme. A number of works from Moore’s collection depict motifs such as Bow Bridge, groves of mountain laurels, and the gardens and grounds surrounding the Florence Griswold House--all beloved by members of the colony. Few of the artists left without first sketching the Bow Bridge—Old Lyme’s equivalent of the famous bridge painted countless times by American artists in the French colony at Grez-sur-Loing a generation earlier. Visitors to the exhibition can compare two paintings of the subject, Gifford Beal’s The Old Bow Bridge, ca.1903-04, and Edmund Geacen’s Bridge at Old Lyme, ca. 1910-11. Beal constructed a timeless view of the bridge, without the telephone poles that appear in Greacen’s rendering.
As Moore’s collecting evolved from a personal pursuit into a means of augmenting the Florence Griswold Museum’s collection, his choices became more even more focused. He acquired Childe Hassam’s The White Church, Newport, 1901, with an awareness that it would increase the representation of major works and iconic subjects by Lyme Art Colony painters. And, although the Moore Collection focuses chiefly on Lyme Art Colony landscapes, the collector made an exception for Ivan Olinsky’s Dream Days, 1917, a portrait of the artist’s daughters. Olinsky’s arrival in Lyme in 1917 signaled the beginning of a greater interest in portraiture among the colony’s artists that would continue through the 1930s—an area of increasing importance to the Florence Griswold Museum that is enhanced by the promised gift.
Guy C. Wiggins, The Mystic River, ca. 1910. Oil on canvas, 24 x 20 in. Collection of Clement C. Moore
