Featured Painting by John Henry Twachtman |
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Waterfall, Yellowstone
by John Henry Twachtman (1853-1902)
In 1895 John Twachtman received the only commission of his career, for a series of paintings of Yellowstone Park. His patron was Major William A. Wadsworth of Geneseo, New York, whom the artist had probably met while staying in Buffalo a few years earlier with Wadsworth's friend, Dr. Charles Cary. The commission afforded Twachtman his first and only trip to the American West, and it resulted in a group of bold and dynamic works that were ahead of their time in their modernity and originality.
By the 1870s, the geologic wonders of the Yellowstone territory had become well known to Eastern audiences. They had been revealed in the reports from the well-publicized expediions of Powell, Hayden, and Lander, discussed in magazine articles, and presented in drawings and paintings created by artists. Illustrators charted the scientific phenomena of Yellowstone, its geysers, canyons, and rugged craggy cliffs, the results of catastrophic volcanic eruptions occurring in the prehistoric past, painters expressed its sublime and majestic beauty. George Catlin, Sanford R. Gifford, and Albert Bierstadt were among the prominent artists who painted in Yellowstone, but it was Thomas Moran who created the best-known images of the area. His works, painted on monumentally-scaled canvases and in sparkling watercolors, immersed the viewer in expansive panoramas filled with detail and incident. Expressing the enormity, drama, and wildness of Yellowstone's extraordinary topography, Moran conveyed the expansionistic sentiments of the mid-century.
Twachtman undoubtedly knew of the works of Moran and others. Nonetheless, Yellowstone took him by surprise. He wrote to Wadsworth on the 22nd of September 1895:
I am overwhelmed with things to do that a year would be a short stay. . . This trip is like the outing of a city boy to the country for the first time.
I was too long in one place. This scenery too is fine enough to shock any mind. We have had several snow storms and the ground is white, the canyon looks more beautiful than ever. The pools are more refined in color but there is much romance in the falls and the canyon. I never felt so fine in my life and am busy from morning until night. One can work so much more in this place never tiring. . . . I want to go to Lower Falls, they are fine. There are many things one wants to do in this place. 1
Twachtman was indeed able to do "many things" while in Yellowstone. His base was his hotel, the Grand Caņon, situated in the Canyon Village near the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Of the hotel, Hiram Chittenden remarked in 1895: "It is half a mile beyond Cascade Creek, in an open park, a little way back from the brink of the Caņon. From its porch, the crest of Upper Fall can be seen, and roar of both [Upper and Lower] cataracts is distinctly audible." 2
Twachtman painted a number of subjects in Yellowstone, including pure canyon views: Canyon in the Yellowstone (private collection), Yellowstone Park (30 x 28-1/2 inches, private collection), Yellowstone Park (20 x 25 inches, private collection), and Yellowstone View. He also was fascinated by the park's geysers, which he painted in several images, five of which are known today: Emerald Pool (Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.), Emerald Pool, Yellowstone (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut), Geyser Pool, Yellowstone (private collection), Morning Glory Pool, Yellowstone (private collection), and Edge of the Emerald Pool.
The Lower Falls of the Yellowstone also provided him with inspiration, and there are four paintings of this subject known today: Waterfall in Yellowstone (Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming), Lower Falls, Yellowstone (private collection), Lower Falls of the Yellowstone (private collection), and Waterfall, Yellowstone. For each work, Twachtman chose different angles on the falls, which inspired him to paint the subject in new and distinctive ways. Moran and Bierstadt had included the Lower Falls in broad, horizontal panoramas that emphasized the park's broad expanses of land, and they used overhead viewpoints that allowed them to see distant vistas. By contrast, Twachtman chose to focus on the falls itself within limited spatial schemes, and he portrayed the subject from below so that the falls have an integral role in the compositional arrangment rather than merely serving as an adornment to a broader landscape treatment. The result is an emphasis on the aesthetic and sensuous experience of the falls rather than on the specific characteristics of the scenery.
In Waterfall in Yellowstone (Buffalo Bill Historical Center), the vertical format produces an elegant composition in which our eye, instead of being drawn back into space, travels downward over the picture plane, and the emerald-green ribbonlike river continues this movement, while slowing and softening its insistance. In Lower Falls, Yellowstone (private collection), Twachtman used a square format, one of his favorites, and the arrangement pulls our gaze inward to the point where the falls intersects with the meeting of two diagonal overlapping planes that represent canyon walls. The arrangement has the simplicity and assymetrical balance of a Japanese print.
For Lower Falls of the Yellowstone (private collection) and Waterfall, Yellowstone, Twachtman further simplified his arrangements, narrowing his vantage point to directly below the falls and featuring simply the falls and the walls of the canyon over which it flowed. In Lower Falls of the Yellowstone, the water issues from the canvas's upper right corner and fans out as it rushes over the canyon. The focal point of the work is the shimmering interaction of the water splashing and foaming at the base of the falls with the opalescent atmospheric light reflecting off of the surface of canyon walls. The result is a poetic vision of nature's spiritual and transcendant force.
In Waterfall, Yellowstone, Twachtman moved even closer to his subject. Perhaps standing on a rocky ledge projecting from the canyon, he painted in a direct, painterly fashion, capturing his immediate impression of the subject with a bold and free handling. Departing from the more carefully composed and decorative qualities of Waterfall in Yellowstone and Lower Falls, Yellowstone, here Twachtman painted as if expressing the feeling of liberation that Yellowstone inspired. In the canyon walls, he layered his paint in broad sweeps, allowing underlayers to remain visible rather than blending them together. In the water, he used forceful strokes of thick impasto to suggest the velocity and density of the flowing water. The resulting work is imbued with a dynamism fitting to its subject.
Although there is no documentation as to the order that Twachtman painted his Yellowstone works, it seems likely that Waterfall, Yellowstone was his last image of the falls. His other images seem more obviously constructed, and having created them, he perhaps felt free to express his immediate response to the "color and romance" of the subject. The painting anticipates the vibrant works that Twachtman would create in Gloucester, Massachusetts, at the end of his career, in which he returned to the alla prima method of his student years, but brought to it the knowledge, confidence, and clarity of mind that he had come with years of experience.
LNP
1 J. H. Twachtman, Grand Canyon Hotel, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, 22 September 1895, to W[illiam] A. Wadsworth [Geneseo, New York], The Wadsworth Family Papers, College Libraries, State University of New York College of Arts and Sciences at Geneseo.
2 Hiram M. Chittenden, The Yellowstone National Park (Cincinnati, Ohio: Robert Clarke Company, 1895; revised and enlarged sixth edition, 1911), p. 317.
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