Elizabeth Tashjian, who died Sunday at 94, was proprietor of the Nut Museum, a quirky collection of nuts, nutcrackers, and nut art that she dared visitors to take seriously.

Situated in a couple of rooms of Tashjian’s Old Lyme, Conn., mansion, the museum garnered the attention of compilers of books on wacky museums (focusing Lawrence Welk, Tupperware, nuts) as well as late-night schmoozers from Carson to Letterman. The Nut Museum even caught the prurient eye of Howard Stern, who thought he was being shocking when making anatomical comparisons.

But like so many who tried to simplify its message, Mr. Stern missed the place’s serious whimsy. In the mold of Salvador Dalí, Tashjian used nuts as the centerpiece of a surreal world in which she was the star performer.

Opened in 1972, the Nut Museum was a showcase for her nut paintings, a nut crèche in a coconut shell, and the prize of her collection, a kind of double coconut weighing 35 pounds from the Maldives, known as a “coco de mer.” Tashjian liked to point out that it resembled a female pelvis, and used it to illustrate her theory that humans were descended from nuts. Darwin, she told Mr. Letterman, was “bunk.”

An 8-foot nutcracker hung out front of the place. Admission originally cost one nut, and when this proved financially impractical, $2 and a nut. The arch-mannered Tashjian, whose naiveté seemed mainly of the faux variety, claimed never to have heard of “nut” as a term of disparagement until a visitor offered his wife in lieu of a nut for admission.

Thereafter, she resolved to remove any stigma from nuttiness. “I’m releasing 20 million people who are called ‘nuts,'” she told the Boston Globe in 2003. “It isn’t a joke, too.”

It was a sad irony, then, that she ended up being declared incompetent and having her Nut Museum shuttered and sold off in lieu of back taxes. “How cruel, how merciless to have the state kidnap the Nut Lady,” she wailed to the Hartford Courant in 2003.

Tashjian grew up in New York, the cosseted daughter of Armenian immigrants. Her father, a carpet dealer, supported the family in a lush Riverside Drive apartment complete with a chauffeur, but her parents were divorced when Tashjian was young.

She claimed that she and her mother were poor after that, though took violin lessons, attended private schools, and went on to study art. She exhibited at galleries in the 1930s and won a prize from the Art Students League. One of Tashjian’s early paintings, “Cracker Chase,” was of an eagle-headed nutcracker preying on hazelnuts.

Following her mother, she became a devout Christian Scientist, serving for a time as a healer. A sense of faith and an awareness of the numinous suffused much of her art, and nuts, in her hands, became tokens of a higher reality.

In 1950, Tashjian and her mother left the city and moved to the 13-room home in Old Lyme. Her mother died in 1959. Tashjian never married, and seems to have become progressively more interested in nuts. By 1972, a small item in the Courant about the opening of the Nut Museum described her as having “spent much of her life amassing a collection of art works based on the theme nuts.”

Tashjian told the Courant she wanted to build a walnut-shaped outbuilding for the collection. The outbuilding was never to be, but more than 30 years later, her ambition still burned. “I am trying to do for nuts what Cezanne did for apples,” she told a new generation of Courant interviewers in 2005.

Alas, her last years were spent in bitter decline. After decades of maintaining the Nut Museum on a shoestring, she began to falter and her home fell into disrepair. The bicycle that was her only transport to the grocery story broke down and was not repaired. Squirrels came down the chimney and began nibbling at the collections.

In 2002, after she refused entry to a social worker, she was declared incompetent and later fell into a coma. She miraculously recovered, but her home was sold for back taxes.

A 2005 documentary, “In a Nutshell,” brought attention to her plight, and a Connecticut College professor of art history, Christopher Steiner, saved her collections. In 2004, he mounted an exhibition of her collection at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, Conn. To emphasize that she, as much as the nuts, was a part of the show, Mr. Steiner included a mannequin of Tashjian. He is writing a book about her, to be called “Performing the Nut Museum.”