OLD LYME, CONN.- The Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, CT, celebrates all things outdoors this summer. Two exhibitions, on view through September 14, focus on the painted landscape. In Nancy Friese: Living Landscapes contemporary artist Friese (b. 1948) immerses viewers in compositions that percolate with texture and color, registering nature’s vitality through abundant detail and exhilarating hues. The second exhibition, Cow Tales, explores the pastoral tradition beginning with mid-19th-century painters who included cows in their idyllic scenes. Later, Lyme Art Colony artists portrayed cows as companions in everyday life. Examples by contemporary artists reveal how cattle still prompt creative expression today. The landscape around the Museum, inspiration for generations of artists, continues to captivate visitors who can enjoy historic gardens, views of the Lieutenant River, and a stroll along the Robert F. Schumann Artists’ Trail.

Nancy Friese: Living Landscapes

Raised in the Midwest and transplanted to the Northeast, Friese received an MFA from Yale School of Art before becoming a professor at Rhode Island School of Design. Her objective is to create what she calls “walk-in paintings” that allow the viewer to feel present in the landscape alongside the artist and to share her awe at nature’s beauty. The fifteen large works in the exhibition cover her career from 1989 to today and include two new paintings exhibited for the first time. Through her extensive travels and artist residencies, she has developed a sensitivity to the distinctiveness of local landscapes. In 2010 she began a series of watercolors that depict the FloGris Museum’s storied setting, forming a portrait of a place that first inspired Lyme Colony artists over a century ago. Although Friese does not define herself as an Impressionist, she shares with those artists a commitment to painting outdoors and an interest in capturing shifting light effects and seasonal changes in the landscape. September on the Lieutenant River (2012) contains the cooler, more delicate, purple shadows of early autumn, differentiating it from the lush, bold summer foliage of Lieutenant River Shore (2010), displayed nearby.

Fellowships and residencies throughout her long career in locales such as Japan, France, and Colorado have allowed Friese to work with different types of terrain and vegetation. She was selected by the College Art Association for a prestigious once-in-a-lifetime fellowship supported by the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund. It enabled her to paint for six months in Giverny, the French village made famous by Impressionist Claude Monet. She acknowledged that his presence and legacy were “daunting,” but with a key to his private garden in hand, she used the time to learn more about Monet’s practices and the pleasures of working outside. In Hills of Giverny (1990) the contrasting colors in the sky suggest that changeable weather. While the fields and poplars recall Monet’s paintings, Friese describes herself as “totally American,” and set aside Monet’s flat, patterned, garden views to tackle the landscape in her own language of big shapes, vibrant layered color, and deep space.

Friese infuses her art with expressive power, using shape, color, and line to conjure the experience of a place. The artist’s reverence for the natural world and for the practice of painting radiates from all her work, encouraging viewers to share the joys of drinking in that energy. “Friese's work is so fluid, so dancerly, it looks like spontaneous play. In truth, the artist returns to the site she is painting a half-dozen times before she finishes each painting, adding new layers of watercolor, anchoring all the dreamy, delirious color with lanky, dark lines,” wrote Cate McQuaid for the Boston Globe. “There's nothing simple about these landscapes; the artist just makes them look easy.”

Cow Tales

Why have cows been such compelling subjects for American artists? Why are cow paintings so beloved by audiences? Many answers to these questions can be traced across eras of American history. In George Henry Durrie’s (1820–1863) quintessential American farm scene, Summer Landscape (1862), cows are a key ingredient in his formula for an idyllic tableau. Hartford-born Durrie combined details he observed from farms around New Haven, where he lived most of his life, to compose the tranquil view that glorified 19th-century American rural life and communicates the essence of New England.

Later, Lyme Art Colony (1900–1937) artists like Matilda Browne, Louis Paul Dessar, and George Glenn Newell portrayed cows as contributors to working society. Lyme cows were often represented hauling timber and salt hay harvested from the region’s forests and waterways. After moving to Lyme in 1922, Edward Volkert (1871–1935) rose before dawn like a farmer to paint cows in the fields. To further educate himself and achieve lifelike effects he modeled the animals in clay to familiarize himself with the solidity and weight of their bodies. In Along the Road Volkert not only flawlessly depicts roaming cows but also hints at Connecticut’s farming history. The herd must part to step around a small boulder in the field. Rocky areas like these proved better for pastures and grazing than for growing crops, helping New England develop a reputation for dairy farming.

Contemporary artists such as Brian Keith Stephens (b. 1973) continue to embrace bovines as a favorite subject. In Visit Your Neighbors (2025), Old Lyme-based Stephens paints a mirrored image of a single longhorn steer named Lefty who, along with his companion Poncho, lives just down the road from the artist’s studio. Cattle have long been recurring figures in Stephens’s work. Raised in rural North Stonington, Connecticut, he was surrounded by farmland and animals, which nurtured a lifelong reverence for the pastoral. Though he has traveled widely and lived abroad, Stephens continually returns—both physically and conceptually—to the landscapes of Old Lyme.

Visitors can participate in a range of interactive elements in the exhibition galleries as well as in the Museum’s historic house. They can vote for the “Best in Show” cow or play dress up and pose like a farmer with our historic selfie wall. Families will enjoy a play area, reading nook, and cow-themed scavenger hunt throughout Florence Griswold’s Boardinghouse for Artists. On the ground, visitors can walk through a two-dimensional “herd” of cows painted by community artists.