Unlike the other panels, Poore worked collaboratively with Walter Griffin and Childe Hassam on Landscape with Cow (below).This is the only panel to be created by more than one artist and diplomatically combines the talents of two staunch impressionists and one tonalist. The panel features a brown cow reclining in a field on the edge of a forest and shallow pond, but the specific authorship of any of the elements is undetermined.

One of the great pleasures and benefits of an art colony, American artists discovered when they became acquainted with some in Europe, was the opportunity to discuss and exchange artistic ideas on a daily basis and to see the stages by which colleagues created works of art. It was serious business.

This panel, however, the collaboration of three men whose distinctive styles are not generally compatible, may have been done as a lark.

Surely it was the Tonalist Henry Rankin Poore who painted the reclining cow. His images of animals were well known; a number grace his Fox Chase mural over the dining room fireplace.

Was Poore mimicking Glenn Newell’s cow on a nearby panel – a cow of a different color but otherwise very much the same? This one lies not in a Dutch landscape, however, but in Old Lyme, where trees are all around as Walter Griffin found to his joy when he arrived in 1904. Griffin liked tall, thin trees with sinuous trunks and limbs, and in his hands tree leaves can seem to shimmer, partly because of his trick of shaping and modeling foliage with a brush loaded with two colors of paint. The tree at the left is surely one of his and so, probably, are the others.

The overlay of short, often parallel strokes in much of the rest of the painting looks like the work of Childe Hassam, a more daring Impressionist than Griffin, and thus the more compelling foil to Poore’s Tonalism. Hassam brushed dashes of sunlight into this scene, most cleverly above, over, and below the body of the cow, so that they highlight the animal like a spotlight. All three artists used the “baked apple” colors that Old Lyme Tonalists like Poore and Henry Ward Ranger were fond of, but sunny highlights, vibrant greens, and lively brushwork by Griffin and Hassam transport this Tonalist cow into an Impressionist landscape.

The “clash” of two popular ways of painting in Old Lyme and in America at the turn of the 20th century may be overdone here for a humorous effect, but many of the Old Lyme art colonists developed a subtle blend of Tonalism and Impressionism.

“Hassam, Poore and Walter Griffin painted the middle panel on the inside wall. It was started as a wedding present for a young about-to-be-bride in Old Lyme. One morning she happened to drop in and found the three of them munching cream cheese and chives in the dining room. She was quite disgusted and did not hesitate to tell them so. Provoked, they decided the painting was far too good for her and gave it to Miss Florence instead.” — Artist Harry Hoffman, 1954

Henry Ward Ranger was delighted with the Griswold House and Old Lyme as a place for a summer art colony like those he had known in France. So when he wanted to do something special for Florence Griswold in 1900, the first summer that he and his friends were together in her home, he decorated a door panel – something he had seen artists do abroad – and he challenged his friend Henry Rankin Poore to complete the picture on the adjacent panel (below).

This was rather like an elaborate version of the wiggle game that the Old Lyme art colonists played, where one artist drew a couple of lines on some paper, then passed it to another, who was expected to turn it into a picture. Since Ranger and Poore aimed at uniting two images into one for this door decoration, we should look at their panels as a pair.

His moonlit scene is of Bow Bridge, the quaint-looking arched bridge over the Lieutenant River that could be seen from Miss Florence’s house. The scene well represents the Tonalism that Ranger promoted, where subdued colors and an often “heavy” atmosphere create an aura of mystery or inspire dreamy feelings.

He stands on another part of the road to the bridge and bays at the full moon. Poore seamlessly matched Ranger’s brushwork and his tones in land, water, and sky. Surely only their artist colleagues would have been able to identify which artist did which panel. Poore was known for his images of animals, Ranger for his landscape views and an often dramatic central light.

These two panels, the first on any Griswold House doors, established a tradition among the colony artists. They are also the only ones not painted directly on a door but on canvas attached to the wood. Perhaps that was done so that Florence Griswold could remove them if she did not want a baying hound dog in her house, but the artists need not have worried. She cherished the gift.