By Jill Knight Weinberger, Globe Correspondent

IF YOU GO . . . Places to visit

COS COB, Conn. - As a youngster growing up in rural Connecticut, I spent my summer days roaming the cow pastures and wading in the swiftly flowing streams that formed the borders of my world. It was a green and gray world of woods, rocks, and water, a landscape both lush and spare, one that artist Henry Ward Ranger once noted was ``waiting to be painted.''

Ranger and dozens of other artists found in Connecticut's countryside and along its shoreline the landscapes, the light, and the camaraderie of other artists that nourished their work during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Inspired by their experiences at such French art colonies as Barbizon and Giverny, Ranger and other painters established their own summer gathering places in southern Connecticut. The former art colonies at Cos Cob, Branchville, and Old Lyme are now National Historic Landmarks, an acknowledgment not only of their role in the lives and works of individual artists but of their place in the development of American Impressionist painting.

Like the French Impressionists of the 1870s and 1880s -- Monet, Renoir, and Degas, to name a few -- many American painters also embraced the use of bright pastels and heavy, broken brushwork to capture light-infused landscapes, figures, or still lifes. Breaking away from a tradition of dark tones, allegorical subjects, and formal realism, the Impressionists sought to convey a sense of immediacy and to depict scenes of everyday life.

Recently, I visited three sites where America's version of Impressionism flourished around the turn of the century. Their locations in southern Connecticut were part of their attraction: Artists could leave their New York studios to spend summer days or weeks along the coast at Cos Cob's Holley Inn, or at Old Lyme, where ``Miss Florence'' Griswold took in a generation of artists as boarders, or in the hills of Branchville, where painter J. Alden Weir had established his farm and welcomed his artist friends to join him. At these sites and in nearby museums, I found the rich legacy of paintings that were created here on native soil, and glimpsed what is left of the landcapes and communities depicted in them. At all three sites, artists' studios left intact bear witness to the creative process that thrived in the Connecticut countryside.

Thirty miles from New York City in the Connecticut village of Cos Cob -- now a part of Greenwich -- the Bush-Holley House Museum reflects two distinct heritages. Reminders of its colonial past are everywhere on display throughout the house, both in the 18th-century design and furnishings.

But far from proving an incompatible setting for cutting edge artists of a later era, the house's history and antiques were part of its attraction. When acquired by Edward and Josephine Holley in 1882, the former Bush home, built in the 1730s, was turned into a boarding house called the Holley Inn. Among the first painters to rent rooms were John Twachtman and J. Alden Weir. The artists painted the local mill pond, the harbor, the village houses. Some of these views today are badly marred by the interstate highway spanning the little harbor just south of the house. But a short walk along Strickland Road to glimpse the mill pond and the neighborhood's other fine old colonial-era homes gives the visitor some idea of how Cos Cob looked a century ago.

In 1891, Twachtman and Weir established a summer school in the barn behind the house and thus established the first Impressionist art colony in the United States. For the next three decades, the art community developed into a cottage industry for locals, as neighboring families also provided room and board to visiting artists and students. Elmer Livingston MacRae, another notable painter who came to Cos Cob, married the innkeepers' daughter, Emma Constant Holley, and in 1900 the couple took over the boarding house from her parents. During the MacRae era, the most important of the American Impressionists, Childe Hassam, was among the Holley Inn's guests. Hassam learned to etch while at Cos Cob, and many of his etchings -- as well as other works -- hang throughout the house today.

But not surprisingly, MacRae's artworks are among the most numerous on display, including a painting that he exhibited at the landmark 1913 Armory Exhibition in New York. MacRae's charming rendition of his young daughter surrounded by a flock of ducks typifies the Impressionist penchant for homey portraits of family life. Emma Constant MacRae and their twin daughters, Clarissa and Constant, were frequent subjects of resident artists. Childe Hassam's lovely 1912 portrait, ``Clarissa,'' hangs in the museum's entry hall, which forms the background of the painting. Matching a painting to its setting is one of the many pleasures of visiting all three art colonies.

Efforts are underway by the Greenwich Historical Society, which owns and maintains the museum and adjoining archives building, to restore the grounds, in particular Emma Constant Holley's gardens, to reflect the art colony era. A new visitors' center and exhibition space, housed in the former Cos Cob post office that adjoins the Bush-Holley property, opened in November.

From Cos Cob it is about an hour's drive to the Branchville section of Wilton, and the Weir Farm National Historic Site. The 57-acre property is Connecticut's only national park and the only one in the country associated with an American painter. Administered by the National Park Service, the property and Weir's studio are open to tours guided by park rangers.

The setting of Weir's beloved farm is pure New England: Stone walls crisscross open pastures and dense woods, and barns and clapboard houses, shaded by oaks and maples, dot the landscape.

The scenery looks much as it did in 1882, when Weir acquired the property in a swap for an obscure still life he owned and a bit of cash. No one could doubt that Weir got the better of the deal.

In the 37 years that Weir lived and painted in Branchville, usually several months of the year, he gathered about him and his family a close circle of artist friends, some of the best-known painters of the era. Frequent visitors included John Twachtman, Childe Hassam, Frederic Remington, Emil Carlsen, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and John Singer Sargent. Ironically, Weir had initially scoffed at the Impressionist principles he first encountered in France in the 1870s. Gradually, under the influence of the farm's landscapes and light, his style began to reflect Impressionist influences, and he is today considered a leader of the American Impressionist school.

At Weir Farm, as at the colonies of Cos Cob and Old Lyme, serious artistic work was interspersed with high-spirited play. But here, a particular pattern for the summer days emerged: Weir and his friends would help with the farm work in the morning, paint in the afternoon, and gather for dinner in the evening, afterward playing dominoes and drinking a little hard cider. Sargent is said to have have been fascinated by the fireflies he saw on summer evenings.

Besides the opportunity to tour Weir's cluttered, dusty studio and that of his son-in-law, the sculptor Mahonri Young (perhaps best known for his ``This Is the Place'' monument in Utah), visitors to Weir Farm can walk the ``Painting Sites Trail.'' Although some 250 art works have been matched to more than 60 sites around the property, the marked trail takes in 12 sites, including a pond that Weir had dug in 1897. An illustrated pamphlet allows one to match etchings and paintings by Weir, Ryder, and Hassam with various views.

The old 18th-century farmhouse that Weir and family occupied is not open to the public; it is now home to artists Sperry and Doris Andrews, who keep Weir Farm an active art colony. The last of the three Connecticut art colonies to be established is commonly acknowledged to be the most important. It, too, centered on one key figure, not a painter, however, but a patron saint of sorts, Florence Griswold.

When Henry Ward Ranger first came to the small coastal town of Old Lyme in 1899, it was in search of his own ``American Barbizon.'' Although a painter of landscapes who found in this region of salt marshes, rivers, and pastures rich subject matter, Ranger was not an Impressionist, nor was the Barbizon colony associated with Impressionism. It was a second wave of painters who arrived in Old Lyme in 1903, headed by Childe Hassam, who brought with them the new colors and textures of Impressionism.

But it was Ranger who found Florence Griswold, the unmarried daughter of a sea captain who had begun to open her grand old late-Georgian style house on Lyme Street to boarders. ``Miss Florence'' -- as she would thereafter be known -- would play a key role in the lives of many American Impressionists. Part housemother, part patron, she provided rooms to her artist boarders and, apparently, more than a few free meals, prepared by the house cook, Whistling Mary. In 1902, Miss Florence charged $7 a week for room and board, a rent some of her residents had difficulty paying.

A tour of the Florence Griswold Museum includes a docent-led walk through the ground-floor rooms, which include the parlor, Miss Florence's bedroom, and the famous dining room, with its paneled walls and doors that various resident artists used as canvases. Painters Hassam, Walter Griffin, and Henry Poore collaborated on one pastoral scene, complete with cow. Cows were a favorite subject of the Old Lyme artists. One visitor was so taken with a door in Miss Florence's parlor on which William Henry Howe had painted a cow (``Howe's Cow'' the residents called it) that he wanted to buy it. When Miss Florence turned him down, he offered to buy the entire house.

Typically, Florence Griswold would refuse the paintings that grateful artists offered. She considered Willard Metcalfe's painting of her house, which the artists dubbed ``Holy House,'' too good to be given away, and she was right. ``May Night,'' as it was called, garnered the artist a prestigious award from the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., where it still hangs.

Unlike Weir Farm, which as yet has no gallery, the Griswold Museum has a fine collection of paintings on its second floor, in the rooms that once housed the colony's married couples (singles were relegated to the third floor). Some are grouped by subject matter: for example, clumps of iris or views of Bow Bridge, which crosses the Lieutenant River just footsteps away from the Griswold property. I was especially moved by a series of paintings of mountain laurel, a much-loved part of Connecticut's late spring landscape. On the six acres surrounding the Griswold Museum are a perennial garden -- Miss Florence was an avid gardener -- and the former studio of William Chadwick. Like many of the artists who boarded with Miss Florence, Chadwick bought property in Old Lyme and stayed. A group of them founded the Lyme Art Association and in 1921 opened their own gallery just a short walk from the Griswold home.

The Cos Cob, Branchville, and Old Lyme art colonies are stops along the Connecticut Impressionist Art Trail devised in 1993 by the Connecticut Tourism Council. The route takes in 12 museums and historic sites around the state where American Impressionist paintings are on display. In southern Connecticut, stops at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, the Yale Art Gallery in New Haven, and the Lyman Allyn Museum in New London may be easily combined with visits to the three American Impressionist art colonies.