One of the biggest and most transformational moments in the Florence Griswold Museum’s history happened 20 years ago, when it received the gift of 190 works by Connecticut artists from the Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company.

The Florence Griswold Museum was established to highlight the work and history of the Lyme Art Colony. That art colony, of course, was centered at the turn of the 20th century at the Old Lyme boarding house that was run by Florence Griswold and that is now part of the museum.

The Lyme Art Colony members were mostly male and mostly white, and their focus in their painting tended to be landscapes, notes Jenny Parsons, the museum’s associate curator.

The Hartford Steam Boilers Collection brought Charles Ethan Porter’s “Strawberries” to Flo Gris, making Porter the first African American to be represented in Flo Gris’s permanent collection. The museum says that “The acquisition and display of additional artwork created by and about diverse populations in Connecticut is a priority moving forward.”

“With the collection from the Hartford Steam Boiler Company, it also opened us up to all these other genres and also geographically and chronologically. The colony was circa 1900; the collection brought examples from the 18th century all the way to the mid-20th century,” Parsons says.

Artists working in other locales were featured in the Hartford Steam Boiler collection, too.

“It allows us to tell the story of Connecticut in a different way and think about the intersection of local and international stories. I mean, Connecticut art is really a microcosm of American art anyway. ... With this gift, we became a museum not only for the Lyme Art Colony but of Connecticut as a whole, which is really exciting,” Parsons says.

In honor of the 20th anniversary of the gift, the Florence Griswold Museum is showcasing a new exhibition, “Expanding Horizons: Celebrating 20 Years of the Hartford Steam Boiler Collection.”

While the museum has featured various pieces from the collection in previous exhibitions, Parsons, who curated “Expanding Horizons,” says, “This was the first time we could dedicate an entire show to just the collection. I thought a lot about how to make it more than just a highlights show and how to connect these historical pieces with concerns that are relevant for us in the present day.

“I thought the best way to highlight them would be to show the kind of progress that the field of American art has had in the last 20 years and then thinking about trends today, about opening up the museum to more diverse audiences, shared authority.”

She says it seemed appropriate to involve other scholars in this process, so the museum commissioned 20 leading art historians to write about specific pieces. That would help the exhibition reflect the new methods of research and interpretation that art historians have been focusing on since the collection first debuted at the Florence Griswold Museum.

Those art historians looked at the pieces through the lenses of environmental art history, material culture, landscape studies, and issues of identity, such as gender and race.

“We’re really grateful that so many great people could respond to the collection and could contribute even a bunch of new discoveries, which we’re thrilled to have,” Parsons says.

Creating a life

Kirsten Pai Buick, professor of art history at the University of New Mexico, explored the aforementioned Porter’s “Strawberries,” an 1888 oil on canvas.  

“From Hartford, Porter experienced both poverty and tragedy as a child. His father was a millworker and his mother labored as a domestic servant. Still lifes allowed him the class mobility that made the dining rituals summarized (in earlier exhibition text) possible for Porter — he painted that life into existence for himself. And he gave back with his deep ties to the Black community,” Buick wrote for the “Expanding Horizons” wall text.

In researching and writing about Porter’s still life “Strawberries,” Parsons says, Buick “was able to weave in this context that really brings to light what kind of environment this still life would have been displayed in in 19th-century dining rooms. She brings in all this material culture about other kinds of objects that would be in dining rooms and the kind of rituals that surrounded (that). She really interweaves in these themes of material culture, class and points out that Porter himself, as an African American who came from poverty, used still life painting as a way of bringing himself into this world. … It takes something seemingly simple, a still life of strawberries, and puts it into this kind of network of how and why paintings were made.”

Buick also touches on details of agriculture and commerce at the time, reflecting the idea that the items in a still life aren’t just props but can give viewers historical information.

Aviatrix and friend of Earhart’s

Parsons herself found fresh information when she researched George de Forest Brush’s “In the Garden.” She has long been intrigued by the painting because, even though it was made in 1923, it looks like it’s from the Renaissance.

The folks at Flo Gris knew certain things about this work — that de Forest was in Italy when he made it, that it is a smaller version of a larger painting that is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But with so much more information accessible on the internet now than 20 years ago, Parsons began searching the names of Brush family members.

“His wife, who had been the center of the compositions, was Mary Taylor Brush, and it turns out she was an artist herself and a pioneering aviator. She trained as a pilot for World War I,” Parsons says.

She learned that Mary Taylor Brush was friends with Amelia Earhart and that she designed camouflage.

“This just really blew open this painting for me. Oh, my goodness, I’m looking at what I thought was the epitome of a kind of traditionalism in the 1920s, and it turns out that the subject of the painting is a thoroughly modern woman,” Parsons says.

“I’m just so excited to learn more about her and to think about this painting in a different way.”

Another new discovery

For “Expanding Horizons,” Jeffrey Richmond-Moll, curator of American art at the George Museum of Art, University of Georgia, focused on John Frederick Kensett’s “Study of a Burdock Plant.” Parsons says that painting is a beloved work that has been shown many times at Flo Gris, but Richmond-Moll looked at it from an ecocritical angle and started by researching the medicinal properties of the burdock plant. He found a reference in a 1860s article in Harper’s Weekly to Kensett painting burdock in Galleria di Sopra in Albano, Italy.

“We hadn’t known the location of where this study was made or what the plant related to. Jeff was able to uncover that this is related to this large group of paintings made in Italy called ‘The Shrine,’ from 1847. Before, we hadn’t known where it was painted or had the date, and now it looks like it could have been a study made for a larger painting because there’s an area at the bottom of that painting that seems to have the same composition as our study,” Parsons says.

Previously, the folks at Flo Gris knew Kensett had traveled to Italy but didn’t know the museum owned an example of the work he did there.

“That’s the beauty of collaborating and getting someone’s new perspective as they look at it in a different way,” Parsons says.

Past dovetails with present

Parsons says she hopes people who see the exhibition will be “reminded about how diverse the Connecticut collection can be and how historical art can dovetail with national concerns, with things that are so relevant for today — with all the civil unrest and political turmoil, a lot of those histories are embedded into the history of art as well. …

“I also hope it’s something of an element of surprise, the excitement of looking at a painting and researching and discovering something completely new about it that opens up a new series of questions. It’s this never-ending sense of discovery that keeps us motivated to want to learn more and to reach broader audiences.”

If you go

What: “Expanding Horizons: Celebrating 20 Years of the Hartford Steam Boiler Collection” 

Where: Florence Griswold Museum, 96 Lyme St., Old Lyme

When: Through May 23, 2021; hours 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tues.-Sun. (from January through March, hours are 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tues.-Sat. from 1-4 p.m. Sun.)

Admission: $10 for adults, $9 for seniors, $8 students, and free to children 12 and under. Reservations must be made at least 24 hours in advance at www.FlorenceGriswoldMuseum.org.

Contact: (860) 434-5542