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Henry Ward Ranger’s View of Old Lyme illuminates two significant impacts the artist made on the history of American art. Inspired by the French Barbizon School paintings he encountered in Paris in 1887, Ranger sought to establish an American artist colony upon his return to New York. In 1899, he visited Old Lyme, Connecticut, and Florence Griswold’s boarding house. Drawn to the countryside, he returned the following summer with more artists. Modeled after the Barbizon school, the colony attracted Tonalist painters who studied nature to imbue the landscape with personal expression and mood, finding in Old Lyme, like the forests of Fontainebleau, an environment detached from the urban world. The art produced here wasn’t merely a step back to the romantic landscapes of the French painters, but a step forward in American landscape painting. Artists sketched preliminary studies directly from nature and completed the works in their studios using an Old Master glazing technique, applying successive layers of tinted varnish to reflect light. As these artists attempted to capture seasons and times of day, they painted impressions of nature in their muted tones. In View of Old Lyme, Ranger’s color palette suggests shades of early fall, with visible texture in the brushstrokes at the lower left, and hints of glazing. A path cuts across the wooded hillside, leading to the small town of Old Lyme. In 1903, Childe Hassam (1859-1935) joined the colony, shifting the style and focus from Tonalism and the Barbizon school to Impressionism and Giverny. The following year, Ranger and several other artists moved twenty miles down the Connecticut coastline to Noank. While some texts suggest this was a major schism due to Ranger’s lack of interest in the bright Impressionist palette and quick painting technique, he remained on good terms with the Lyme artists. Despite the subsequent eclipse of the American Barbizon School by American Impressionism, the colony remains an important step in introducing American artists and collectors to early-20th century European innovations. Ranger’s other major influence was his final bequest to the National Academy of Design*, indicated on View of Old Lyme by the appearance of a stamp in the lower right corner: “SOLD FOR BENEFIT OF RANGER FUND,” and directly above, a less visible red triangle, the possible remnants of the artists’ estate stamp. Ranger left his estate to the Academy, directing that the income from the invested principal be spent on “purchasing paintings produced by American Artists...All pictures so purchased are to be given by the Council to art institutions in America, or to any library or other institutions in America maintaining a gallery open to the public...” By the 100th anniversary of Ranger's birthday in 1958, Ranger’s bequest had enabled the purchase of 225 pictures, which were allocated to 148 public institutions throughout the U.S. *The National Academy of Design, now celebrating it’s 200th anniversary, donated its records from 1817 - 2012 to the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in 2018.
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