River Island, c. 1900
Oil on wood panel
Florence Griswold Museum
Gift of the Hartford Steam Boiler
Inspection and Insurance Company
Talcott first came to Old Lyme in 1901, already a convert to Impressionism after contact with Twachtman in Cos Cob and Dawson-Watson in Hartford. A decorative group of trees on a rocky island caught his eye, but this outcrop, only a mile south of the Florence Griswold Museum, is known today for harboring a variety of prickly pear, the only cactus native to New England.
Rare today because Victorians avidly collected this plant for their beloved terrariums, the species survived because animals carried broken-off "joints" to isolated habitats like this, where they rooted and grew.