Visit the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts

If you love to draw, paint, or sculpt representational art, we invite you to visit the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts, distinguished among art colleges, as the sole fine-arts-only school in New England. We are a small, intimate community of artists who are fully engaged in creating figurative art, and our facilities are designed to engage the creative process and enhance your art making. Check our Foundation Studio, Café, Senior Studios, Library, Studios, and Gallery spaces. View the facilities.

During your time here we will do our best to have you participate in a class, speak with students and faculty, and have you talk with Student Services (housing) and Financial Aid. We can also review your portfolio, a step in the application process.

Old Lyme is a charming, quiet community which offers the advantages of easy access to such leading art centers as New York and Boston combined with life in one of the most beautiful, unspoiled areas in America. Since the turn of the century, Old Lyme has been a colony for painters. The luminosity of the Lyme landscape first attracted artists because of its resemblance  to the light and landscape painted by the Impressionists in France, and it soon became a center for the American Impressionists. The early Lyme artists met at the home of Florence Griswold, now the Griswold Museum, just a short distance from the 1817 John Sill House, now housing the galleries and administrative offices for the Lyme Academy Old Lyme is surrounded by possibly the most varied and beautiful countryside in southern New England. It is located on the unspoiled Connecticut River estuary, with its vast tidal marshes and sparkling tributaries. These combined with the surrounding glacial hills and forest offer a challenging range of artistic opportunity. With its proximity to both New York and Boston, as well as to the major collections held by Yale University, the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Lyman Allyn Museum, The New Britain Museum of American Art, and others, the College's location offers particular advantages for the study of art and it presents a sensibility and range of visual opportunities, beyond that of many art colleges and art schools in the country.