Old Lyme resident who fostered the Impressionist art movement in America.

Born on Christmas morning to prosperous sea captain Robert Harper Griswold and Helen Powers Griswold, Florence and her three siblings' early years were cultivated and privileged. With the decline in her father's investments, however, the family's financial situation deteriorated and her mother decided to open the family home to a finishing school for “young ladies.” Throughout her life Griswold continued to confront financial difficulties. At the age of 49 she transformed the family home into a boarding house. For the next decade at $7 a week per room she hosted artists drawn to the allure of Connecticut's picturesque rural setting.

The Griswold home housed an average of fifteen artists who came to Old Lyme for four months each summer to paint “en plein air.” Griswold provided lodging, meals, emotional and artistic support. Regular boarders included artists at various stages of their careers: William Henry Howe was just starting out, Matilda Browne was well-known, and Childe Hassam quite famous, for example. A full-fledged art colony soon developed that would play a pivotal role in the rise of American Impressionism and would lead to Old Lyme being coined the Giverny of America.

Respected for her expansive hospitality and critical eye, Griswold offered encouragement to her boarders and sold their work from her hallway gallery. Nonetheless, she faced constant debt because of the credit she extended to them. To repay her own creditors, she was forced to consider selling the home. Some of the more successful artists, who fondly referred to her as Miss Florence and whose careers she had helped foster, then organized to purchase the property and turn it into a museum. Today, the Florence Griswold Museum is an architectural treasure that occupies a unique place in the history of American Impressionism and welcomes over 40,000 visitors a year from around the world. Miss Florence died in the home in which she was born at the age of 87.