Exhibition Note: A Summer Task: Transporting Old Lyme’s Flowers
by Carolyn Wakeman Featured image (above): Cecilia Beaux, Ethel Saltus Ludington, [...]
Exhibition Note: Old Lyme’s Concert Band
Carolyn Wakeman Featured Photo: Unidentified artist, A Massachusetts Militia Bandsman, ca. [...]
Landmarks: The Disappearance of a Lyme Street House
Carolyn Wakeman Featured Photo: Joseph Perkins house, ca. 1890, showing apple [...]
Exhibition Note: The Celebrated Gardens of Lyme Artists
In the cultivated wildness of their flower gardens, local artists showcased their delight in color, pattern, and form. According to The Hartford Courant in 1931, Lucian Abrams, whose paintings are lavishly displayed in the Florence Griswold Museum’s spring exhibition A Cosmopolitan in Connecticut, was one of several Lyme painters known as much “for their wonderful flowers and the studied care of their houses and grounds as for their pictures.”
Photographs: Painted Gardens, Part 2—The Ludington Estate
The gardens that surrounded Old Lyme’s Meetinghouse for more than a century trace the changing needs, tastes, and financial circumstances of a prominent local family. A series of images taken in 1925 by photographer Edna Leighton Tyler (1879–1970) captures the sweeping lawns and luxuriant flowerbeds on Katharine Ludington’s estate. But the land behind her elegant Colonial Revival home had once served more practical uses.
Profiles: Elsie Ferguson (1883–1961)
Elsie Ferguson, a celebrated Broadway actress and star of the silent screen during the World War I era, settled in Old Lyme in 1955. The gabled front addition to an historic tavern became her final home.
