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Landscape painter John Henry Twachtman was one of the most original and modern artists of the late nineteenth century. Trained in Munich and Paris, and a member of the most advanced American artist groups of his day, Twachtman was at the forefront of the American avant-garde throughout his career. The work of his Greenwich Period, for which he is best known, was influenced by Impressionism and Tonalism, yet Twachtman's stylistic synthesis was unique. Often compared with Claude Monet and James McNeill Whistler, Twachtman developed an experimental technique and explored innovative compositional means to create subtle and poetic images that anticipated directions in twentieth-century abstract painting.

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to German immigrant parents, Twachtman found his first employment in his hometown at Breneman Brothers, a design firm that produced window shades, where his father also worked. At age fifteen, he enrolled as a part-time student in the School of Design at the Ohio Mechanics’ Institute. In 1871 he transferred to the McMicken School of Design where his classmates included Kenyon Cox, Joseph DeCamp, Robert Blum, Lewis Henry Meakin, and William Baer, all of whom achieved artistic prominence in their later careers. Frank Duveneck, however, was the most important contact of Twachtman's Cincinnati years. Twachtman had known Duveneck through mutual ties in the Cincinnati German community, but the younger Twachtman came under the slightly older artist's influence when he joined the evening class Duveneck taught at the Mechanics' Institute in 1874-75 on his return from four years of study at the Munich Royal Academy.

Duveneck invited Twachtman to paint in the studio he shared with Henry Farny and the sculptor Frank Dengler, and in 1875 when Duveneck returned to Munich, Twachtman accompanied him. Enrolling in the Munich Royal Academy in the Fall of 1875, Twachtman studied under Ludwig von Loefftz, a painter of realist genre scenes. In the summer of 1876, Twachtman visited the small Bavarian town of Polling, which had attracted a large community of artists including many American painters. American artists Charles Ulrich and Walter Shirlaw also spent time in Polling in the summer of 1876.

In the spring of 1877 Twachtman joined Duveneck and William Merritt Chase in Venice, where he remained for approximately nine months. After returning to America in 1878, Twachtman briefly visited Cincinnati before going to New York. There, in 1878, he participated in the first exhibition of the Society of American Artists, which elected him to membership in 1880. During his time in New York, Twachtman lived in the Benedict building on Washington Square, painted the city's harbors in a bold realist style, and participated in the activities of the Tile Club. Many important contacts were made in Tile Club gatherings including artists J. Alden Weir and R. Swain Gifford.

Twachtman returned to Cincinnati in the fall of 1879 to teach at the Women's Art Association, remaining in Cincinnati through the summer of 1880. In October he sailed for Italy. Reaching Florence in the next month, he became a teacher in a school that Duveneck had established there and fraternized with a group of fellow painters, who became known as the Duveneck “boys.” These included Otto Bacher, Oliver Dennett Grover, Louis Ritter, Theodore Wendel, and Joseph DeCamp.

After his marriage in 1881 in Cincinnati to the artist Martha Scudder, Twachtman went to Europe on his honeymoon. The couple visited England, Belgium, and Germany, but spent most of their time in Holland, where they painted in Dordrecht and its surrounding communities with J. Alden Weir and his brother John Ferguson Weir. During this trip, Twachtman sought out and met the Dutch Hague School painter Anton Mauve who gave him encouragement and advice.

Like many other artists of his generation, Twachtman felt the necessity of a term of study in Paris, and, in 1883, he departed for the French capital, where he continued his training at the Académie Julian under Gustave Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre. His fellow students included American artists Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf, Frank W. Benson, Edmund C. Tarbell, and Robert Reid, all of whom became lifelong friends. During his summers abroad, Twachtman painted near Honfleur and Dieppe, in Normandy, and at the end of his sojourn in the winter of 1885, he spent time in Venice with Robert Blum. Influenced by his training as well as by the art of James McNeill Whistler, that of the French pleinairiste Jules Bastien-Lepage, and by Japanese prints, his work changed during his French period; his palette remained low-key, but his tones became more closely modulated and his brushwork became fluid and large not apparent.

Following his return to America in 1886, Twachtman went to Chicago where he worked on a cyclorama of the Civil War Battle of Gettysburg. His associates on this project were friends from Munich and Florence, including Grover, John O. Anderson, and Thadeus Welch. By the winter of 1888, Twachtman had moved east once more, and was spending time visiting Branchville, Connecticut, where J. Alden Weir lived. That summer, he stayed with his family in Branchville, which by then included three children, Alden (1882-1974), Marjorie (1884-1964), and Elsie (1886-1895). In 1889, Twachtman and Weir held a joint exhibition and sale of their works at the Ortgies Gallery in New York, and four years later, the American Art Gallery featured their work in a comparative exhibition with that of Monet and Paul Besnard. Twachtman produced illustrations for Scribner's from 1888 to 1893, and in 1889, he began to teach at the Art Students League. These activities provided the income with which he purchased a house and land in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1890. He eventually acquired seventeen acres. During the years in Greenwich, the artist and his wife had more children, although two died young, Eric Christian (1890-1891), who died as a baby, and Elsie, who died at age nine of scarlet fever. The artists other children were Quentin (1892-1954), Violet (1895-1964), and Godfrey (1897-after 1979).

During the 1890s, Twachtman’s home and property in Greenwich was his primary subject matter. Over the course of his years in Greenwich, he had modified his home, changing it from a small, upright farmhouse to a rambling, low-lying structure that was oriented with the lay of the land and appeared unified with its site. For the front of his house, the architect Stanford White designed a columned Tuscan portico, while a dining room was open to the sky with vine trellises overhead. At the back of the house, the artist planted a garden, consisting largely of wildflowers that grew freely on either sides of sunlit paths and around an outdoor patio. Through his property, Horseneck Brook meandered. The artist portrayed the brook throughout the year, depicting it under ice in winter and emerging during spring thaws. He painted the small pools that extended from it, delighted in depicting a waterfall that cascaded just behind his home, and he built a white wooden latticed bridge over it that became the subject for several works. A large pool gathered to the southwest of his home became a place for his children to row boats and another subject that he could explore in his art.

In his paintings, he continued his interest in soft tonal qualities, but he adopted an Impressionist technique, painting with broken brushwork and blending his colors directly on canvas. His introduction to the new style came not only through seeing the work of French painters in New York galleries, but also through friends such as Theodore Robinson, who had spent time over the course of many years in Giverny, France, where he was a close friend of Claude Monet. An interest in structured compositions and a strong sense of design also become apparent in Twachtman’s Greenwich paintings.

In 1897 Twachtman was a founding member of the Ten American Painters, a group of primarily Impressionist painters who broke from the Society of American Artists. He continued to teach at the Art Students League through the 1890s, bringing students to the Holley House in Cos Cob (near his home in Greenwich), during the summers where he occasionally resided. He spent the summers of 1900 to 1902 in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he joined his old friend Duveneck and other painters many of whom started their careers in Cincinnati. For his Gloucester works, Twachtman painted alla prima, returning to the bold painterly style of his Munich years, but retaining the bright palette of his Greenwich art. One-man shows of his paintings and pastels were held in New York, Chicago, and Cincinnati in 1901. In the summer of 1902, Twachtman died suddenly in Gloucester. Several of his colleagues wrote at the time of Twachtman's modernity, the "great beauty of design" in his work, and his ability to express the spirit of the places he painted. Thomas Dewing wrote: "By the death of John H. Twachtman, the world has lost an artist of the first rank...He is too modern, probably, to be fully recognized or appreciated at present: but his place will be recognized in the future."1

Twachtman's works are in numerous important private and public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio; the National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; the Cleveland Museum, Ohio; the Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan; the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri; the St. Louis Museum of Art, Missouri; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; and many others.


LNP

1 T. W. Dewing, "John H. Twachtman: An Estimation," North American Review 176 (April 1903), p. 554.

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