Road near Honfleur

John Henry Twachtman’s Road Near Honfleur depicts the curving coastal road between the towns of Trouville and Honfleur in the French Atlantic province of Normandy. The vertical composition, echoed by the slender trees, emphasizes the depth of space defined by the receding track as it winds past a farmhouse nestled in the hillside. Muted light is diffused over the scene, which is thinly painted in a harmonious palette of cool, silvery greens. Forms are generalized, and even the palpable sense of atmosphere is subordinated to poetic evocation and to a sense of decorative design in the arrangement of the elements of the scene.

Road Near Honfleur probably was painted in 1885, during the second of two consecutive summers that the artist spent in Normandy during vacations from his studies at the Académie Julian in Paris. Twachtman followed the practice common to many painters of deserting the city for rural locales during the summer months: there, he abandoned his study of the figure and indulged his passion for landscape. The area near Honfleur had long attracted artists, especially after the opening of the railway in 1862 allowed easy access from Paris; in the mid-1860s, Claude Monet (1840–1926), leader of the French impressionist painters, made the Trouville-Honfleur road the subject of his first essay in serial painting. For Twachtman, the setting also inspired a closely related etching, French Landscape, (TF 2004.2) and the painting The River (TF 1989.1) (both in the Terra Foundation’s collection), as well as the masterpiece of his early career, Arques-la-Bataille of 1885 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). These works’ spare, elegant design, flattening of perspective, and high horizon reveal Twachtman’s indebtedness to Japanese woodcut prints, perhaps also the inspiration for the vertical orientation of Road Near Honfleur. The work’s sensuous pastoralism, however, indicates his study of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape paintings, which often feature a road winding into the distance, while the restrained, silvery palette favored by Twachtman in this period demonstrates the influence of his friend, French painter Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848–1884).

Road Near Honfleur marks the transition from the artist’s early manner, which was heavily influenced by the dark tonalities and laden brushwork of the Munich School in which he had first trained, to the lighter, more poetic approach that would define his mature style. The moodiness of the scene arises not only from its somber light and evocation of quiet, windswept desolation, but from such formal elements as the cool, muted color scheme; the confined, vertically oriented view; and the blurring effect of the soft, brushy definition of forms. In Road Near Honfleur, Twachtman progressed toward a subjective landscape of mood founded as much on style as on setting.

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Americans Abroad: Landscape and Artistic Exchange, 1800–1920 (穿越大洋的艺术 | 美国印第安纳大学埃斯凯纳齐艺术博物馆藏19–20世纪风景画展)", Exhibition partnership between the Eskenazi Museum of Art (Indiana University) and the Tsinghua University Art Museum (organizers). Venue: Tsinghua University Art Museum, Beijing, China, September 21, 2018–March 17, 2019. [exh. cat.]

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