Jean Swan Gordon died on April 26, 2013 at her home in Old Lyme, Conn., at the age of 91.She was born on February 22, 1922, in Brooklyn, N.Y., the oldest of four children, to John and Helen Ross Swan. After a brief time in Fall River, Mass., the family moved to Norfolk, Va., where her father ran the Norfolk branch of William H. Swan and Sons, a ship chandlery and former ship building company, founded by her great-grandfather. She graduated from Smith College in 1942.

On December 2, 1943 she married Navy Lieutenant Robert C. Gordon while he was home on “survivor’s leave” from the South Pacific, where his ship had been sunk by Japanese torpedoes. December of this year would have been their 70th anniversary.

The couple had three children, John, Craigie and Alan. They lived in Cambridge, Mass.; Eugene, Ore.; Edinburgh, Scotland; and Los Gatos, Calif. On her husband’s retirement from teaching, they came back east and settled in Old Lyme, Conn., spending summers on the Mill Pond in East Boothbay in a home near those where her Maine ancestors, of which she was inordinately proud, had once lived. There are three Gordon grandchildren, Jonathan, Ashley and Sasha (Alexandra), and one great-grandchild, Laurel.

Jean Gordon was an artist. She was a child prodigy who, when circumstances allowed, never stopped painting. As a teenager she came to Old Lyme to study with Winfield Scott Clime and to North Truro, Cape Cod, Massachusetts to study with Jerry Farnsworth.

Over the decades her art work went through several phases, beginning with portraits, finally reaching what in retrospect seemed the inevitable fusion of her love of line and color with her love of gardening.

The paintings for which she is most remembered, popular enough to have inspired at least one plagiarist, were of garden and wild flowers in glass vessels, displaying both petals and stems, the blossoming with the withering.

They have been called “anti-bouquets – informal, energetic, and attentive to every feeding and winding tendril, as well as the various stages of growth and decay.” Many are now held by private collectors and institution's collections.

Jean Gordon was predeceased by her daughter, Craigie Gordon, and is survived by her husband, one sister, two sons, three grandchildren, one great-grandchild – and much beauty which, without her, would not have come to be.

Donations in Jean’s name should be made to the Tree of Life Educational Foundation or The Crosby Fund for Haitian Education or the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

A memorial service will be held Saturday, May 11 at 3 p.m. in the First Congregational Church of Old Lyme, the church long attended by Jean and her husband.