Guy Carlton Wiggins (1883-1962) was born in Brooklyn, New York, and then traveled to England with his family as a boy where he received his early education. He was the son of Carleton Wiggins, an American painter in the Barbizon style who studied with George Inness and admired Anton Mauve and Dwight Tryon. The Wiggins family had been early and regular visitors to the Old Lyme Colony, and by 1915 Carlton Wiggins had settled in Lyme permanently. He became active in the Lyme Art Association and in the social life of Old Lyme. 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. In 1930 Wiggins, though he still listed a winter New York address in the American Art Annual, was advertising the "Guy Wiggins Art School: New Haven (winter); Lyme (summer)." Hartford artist James Goodwin McManus often taught the summer classes with him at Hamburg Cove. In 1937, at the age of fifty-four, Wiggins who had relocated to Essex, moved his art school there year-around. He invited for his students' benefit such guests as George Luks, Bruce Crane, Eugene Higgins and John Noble. He formed the Essex Painters Society. He died while on vacation in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1962