Florence Griswold Director Jeff Andersen Retiring

Jeff Andersen, who has been director of the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme for 40 years, will step down after a new director is appointed, the museum announced Tuesday. Ted Hamilton, president of the museums’ board of trustees, said a national search will be undertaken.

Andersen lives in Quaker Hill with his wife, artist and former Connecticut College professor Maureen McCabe.

Andersen, 63, a native of Redwood City, Calif., came to the FloGris after completing his master’s degree in museum studies at Cooperstown Graduate Program in Cooperstown, N.Y.

At the beginning of Andersen’s tenure, the FloGris had one staff member — himself — and fewer than 1,000 visitors per year. Today the accredited museum has 20 staff members, 225 volunteers, nearly 80,000 visitors annually and more than 3,000 members, the museum reports.

Andersen helped establish an endowment fund and led an effort to reacquire the original Florence Griswold property that had been sold during the 1930s. Seven transactions, the last taking place in 2016, succeeded in reuniting the original estate.

“Last year’s acquisition of the final parcel of Miss Florence’s historic estate, something that the museum and I had been working on for more than 20 years, was a thrilling moment for me, and it kind of brought a sense of completion of one aspect of what I’ve been working on and let me to think about the future,” Andersen said in a phone interview. “There are some wonderful landscape plans being pulled together, maybe some new gallery space. There are some things on the horizon that would require a pretty significant time commitment of five to seven years. I came to a point that I needed to either make that commitment or step aside.”

Andersen said one of the memorable highlights of his career was the donation to the museum, in 2001, of the entire Hartford Steam Boiler collection of 190 works of American art. “It’s one of the great corporate collections in the country,” he said. “That was really the key moment of reinventing the museum.”