Guy Carleton Wiggins (1881-1962) is best known for his impressionistic snow scenes of New York in 1920's. Wiggins lived in Old Lyme and Essex where he operated an art school. The Connecticut country-side was conducive to his impressionist technique of plein-air painting and broken brushwork.
Guy Carleton Wiggins had a long and successful career as an Impressionist artist and teacher in New York and Connecticut, but he once told his son (also an artist named Guy) "painting is a wonderful hobby, but a damned difficult way to make a living." Ironically, although his work includes many fine Connecticut landscapes, he is best remembered for some snow scenes of New York City. Like many other American Impressionists, Wiggins had one foot in the city and the other in the country.
Wiggins was born in Brooklyn, New York, went to England with his family as a boy, received an English grammar school education, and traveled widely abroad. He was the son of a prominent artist, Carleton Wiggins, a painter in the Barbizon style who studied with George Inness and admired Anton Mauve and Dwight Tryon. The father and his family had been early and regular visitors to the Old Lyme Colony, and the elder artist had settled in Lyme permanently by 1915, where he was active in the Lyme Art Association and in the social life of the colony. Carleton Wiggins' palette had brightened under the influence of Old Lyme Impressionism, but in general his work remained tonal and his subjects were truly pastoral, his paintings often of sheep in a meadow.