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 (Fig. 3).

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 (Fig. 4).

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 (Fig. 5). Through his property, Horseneck Brook meandered (Fig. 6). 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 (Fig. 7), 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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For further information about John Henry Twachtman, see the bibliography section on this web site.