Florence Griswold Museum Grounds

Author's Comments

The thing to understand about photographing here is that the painters got there first. Hassam and Metcalf and the rest of them spent decades looking at this exact light on this exact river, and any honest photograph you make on these grounds is in conversation with what they already saw. I find that helpful rather than intimidating. It tells me what to look for. Late May is the window. The perennial beds along the side of the house come in waves through June, but there is a particular morning in the last week of May when the peonies are heavy and the light off the Lieutenant River is still cool and the grass has not yet gone to summer. Come early. The grounds open before the museum does and you can walk the gardens and the river path without paying admission, though I would pay it anyway for the interior. What I keep photographing is not the house itself but the relationship between the house and the meadow that runs down to the water. There is a particular angle from the southeast where the white clapboard catches morning light and the river is visible through the trees beyond, and the whole composition arranges itself the way the Impressionists understood it would. It is not a dramatic photograph. It is a quiet one. The kind that rewards being made carefully rather than quickly. Bring something in the 50 to 85 range. Wider than that and the grounds lose their intimacy. Tighter and you miss the layering that is the whole point.

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