Lillian Baynes Griffin

Lillian Baynes Griffin (1871–1916) was a British-born American journalist and photographer who contributed to publications including the New York Times and Vanity Fair. Her article topics ranged from medical treatments and art criticism to gardening and needlework, and among her portrait subjects were Grover Cleveland’s family, John Jacob Astor VI and European royalty. She was the sister of the naturalist Ernest Harold Baynes (1868–1925) and the wife of the artist Walter Griffin (1861–1935).

Lillian Baynes was the only daughter of John Baynes (1842–1903), a British inventor, and Helen Augusta Nowill Baynes (1850–1909). In the 1870s, after John had failed at running a textiles company in Calcutta, the family moved to New York. John set up the Baynes Tracery and Mosaic Co., which produced etched memorial tablets, among other products. (He patented manufacturing processes with the tastemaker Lockwood de Forest, and Baynes tablets survive at Grace Church in Newark, the Battell Chapel and Norfolk Library in Norfolk, Conn., and the Cleveland Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument.) Lillian trained at the New York Institute for Artist Artisans at 140 West 23rd Street (around 1893) and, in summer 1894, at the Shinnecock art school in Southampton on Long Island run by William Merritt Chase. Her brothers, the naturalist Ernest Harold Baynes and the metal etcher and photographer John R. Baynes, briefly worked for their father, who claimed (without proof) to have invented “photo-modeling,” a technique for using light to carve sculpture. In 1899, Lillian married the painter Walter Griffin; by then she had written about topics including art classes taught by William Merritt Chase and advancements in care for premature infants. The Griffins spent a few summers in Quebec City, running Walter's Summer Painting School. They mostly lived in Hartford, Conn., where Walter taught art, and they worked for the short-lived Farmington Magazine. In 1906, Lillian took up photography—given what she called “little opportunity for a woman to study photography professionally,” she learned techniques from other photographers. By 1908 she was estranged from Walter, who had stopped supporting her. She set up a studio in Manhattan at 39 West 67th Street, specializing in portraiture, and she joined the Hartford Camera Club, the Boston Camera Club, the Camera Club of New York and Britain's Royal Photographic Society. She traveled widely on assignment until shortly before her death.

...
Wikipedia