During the summer of 1900, the first for the art colony, founding artist Henry Ward Ranger painted a picture on the outside of the door to the room he rented. This idea most likely came to him from his travels in Europe where this practice was common in the country inns frequented by artists. The notion quickly spread to the other doors on the first floor.

In 1905, the painter Willard Metcalf suggested the artists line the walls of the dining room with individual wood panels to continue the tradition. An invitation to paint a panel was the utmost signifier that an artist was a welcomed guest at the boardinghouse and member of the colony. The most elaborate panel is Henry Rankin Poore’s The Fox Chase, a long frieze-like painting across the fireplace that depicts the members of the colony in a mock fox hunt through the village.

“Miss Florence has taken artists (for whom Lyme is headquarters in this part of the world) in to board in her spacious old house out of mind, and the place is a perfect artistic curiosity shop, the walls and doors of one room, for example, being painted from end to end with landscapes and figures by men of all stamps, most of them now famous.”

~ President of Princeton University Woodrow Wilson, 1909

This prized collection of nearly 40 painted doors and panels quickly became an attraction that lured tourists to the boardinghouse. “Every stranger within the gates of Lyme wants to see it – and to see it is to admire it,” wrote one observer in 1914. Informal tours of the panels would be led by Florence Griswold herself, who would often conclude with a genteel sales pitch in the hall, which was outfitted as a make-shift gallery space to sell art colony paintings and local antiques.

To learn more about the painted doors and panels in the house, click on In-Situ: The Painted Panels.

“So many of the artists have left a visible impress upon it in the way of a painted panel ‘for remembrance,’ that the old mansion has developed into a show place of an altogether unique character.”

~ Journalist H.S. Adams, 1914

Learn more about the Griswold boardinghouse by clicking the choices below:

• Intro
• Imagine Yourself
• Inside the House
• Outside the House
• Who's Who
• Painted Panels