Walter Griffin's father was a carver of ship figureheads and belonged to a group of amateur Portland painters who styled themselves "the Brush'uns." His first experience in art came when he joined his father in sessions with this group. Griffin is reported to have entered the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as a scholarship student in 1877. He also studied sculpture in night classes with Truman Bartlett. The school's archives, however, record Griffin's enrollment in 1880; interestingly, he gave a Paris address at the time he registered. Although there is no documentation showing how long he stayed at the Boston museum school, it may well have been five years, for the oft-repeated statement that Griffin went to New York and entered the Academy school in 1882 is also erroneous. It was not until 1885 that he enrolled in both the Academy's antique and life classes. Further, Montague Flagg, with whom he formed a special friendship, held a temporary post at the Academy school only during the 1885-86 season.
Griffin remained at the Academy school through 1886-87 while teaching at Felix Adler's Ethical Culture Society. With his earnings from teaching, he was able to finance a trip to France.
In Paris in 1887 Griffin worked at the Académie Colarossi with Raphael Collin, at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and with Jean-Paul Laurens. After discovering the Barbizon villages of Fleury and Fontainebleau, he befriended the French master Jean-François Millet and began concentrating on landscape painting. In about 1890 he settled in Fleury and taught art classes. He returned briefly to America in 1894 for an exhibition of his works, which was successful; he sold enough of them to pay for several more years in France. Griffin made his first extended return to North America by 1898, when he initiated a summer art school in Quebec; it lasted at least through the summer of 1899. In 1898 he began teaching at the school of the Art Society of Hartford and continued his association with that school through 1905-6.
Perhaps due to his friendship with Childe Hassam, Griffin began summering at the art colony in Old Lyme, Connecticut, in 1904. His palette brightened under the influence of the Connecticut Impressionists. With his divorce in 1908, he abandoned Old Lyme, although he continued contributing occasionally to the colony's yearly exhibitions. He would spend roughly the next twenty years living and working abroad.
A stay in Norway in 1909-10 had a particularly liberating influence Griffin's style. He was in Boigneville, France, from 1911 to 1918, except for 1913, which he spent in Venice. From 1918 to 1922, he was in Stroudwater, Maine. For much of the decade from 1923 to 1933 he was in France, favoring the town of Contes, near Nice, after 1926. But during that period he made frequent appearances in America, usually for exhibitions of his work. In 1933 he settled in a hotel apartment in Portland, Maine, where, despite failing health during the final two years of his life, he continued to paint.
