Where American Impressionism found its light — a 1640 town on the Long Island Sound shore. Greenwich, Connecticut is the place where American Impressionism took root. From the 1890s into the 1920s, painters drawn to the harbors, tidal marshes, and winding rivers of the Greenwich shore gathered at the Bush-Holley House to form the first art colony in Connecticut, the Cos Cob Art Colony — a cradle of the American Impressionist movement. But the town's story runs much deeper than its painters: settled in 1640, Greenwich is among the oldest towns in Connecticut and the southwesternmost municipality in all of New England, and it carries a Revolutionary War legend on its very town seal.
The Siwanoy, a Munsee-Lenape people, lived along this shore long before the colonists, with a summer fishing camp out on the point that is now Greenwich Point. In 1640 English settlers established the town on land purchased from the Siwanoy, in the area first called Horseneck. Greenwich grew slowly through the colonial era as a farming and coastal-trade town until the Revolution put it on the map: on February 26, 1779, during the Battle of Horse Neck, General Israel Putnam was cut off from his men by British cavalry and — by the celebrated account still carried on the Town of Greenwich seal — escaped by riding his horse straight down the steep, rocky face of Put's Hill, where no dragoon dared follow. The railroad arrived in 1848 and changed everything, turning Greenwich into a wealthy New York summer retreat. It was that summer-resort era, and the luminous coastal landscape, that drew the artists.
Why People Visit Greenwich Connecticut
Greenwich draws people who love art, history, and the coast in equal measure. It is the birthplace of an American art movement, a Revolutionary-era town with its founding legend on the seal, and a Gold Coast shoreline of harbors, marshes, and beaches on Long Island Sound. Visitors come for the rare combination — fine-art heritage you can walk through, colonial history you can stand on, and a refined coastal town that wears its wealth quietly, all an easy train ride from New York.
