John H. Twachtman

Best known for his intimate, hushed wintertime scenes, John Henry Twachtman developed a highly personal, subjective approach to landscape painting that suggests both poetic effect and abstract design. Twachtman was the son of German immigrants and grew up in a lively German quarter in Cincinnati, Ohio. He worked with his father, a decorative painter, while studying in local art academies. In 1874, Twachtman became a pupil of fellow Cincinnati native and painter Frank Duveneck, who had studied at the Royal Academy in Munich, Germany, and who encouraged his students to paint broadly and to use everyday people. rather than professional models, as their subjects. Twachtman followed his teacher to Munich and enrolled in the progressive Royal Academy; he also traveled with Duveneck to Venice. In 1879, Twachtman moved to New York and exhibited his painterly, Munich-inspired canvases with some success. He returned to Europe in 1880 to teach at Duveneck’s art school in Florence, but also visited Venice, where he met the iconoclastic American expatriate artist James McNeill Whistler. Twachtman returned to Europe again in 1883–1885, living in Paris and working along the northern coast of France and in Holland. Moving away from the dark tonalities and heavy paint application of the Munich manner, he began to create subtler, more evocative landscapes in brighter, thinly applied pigment. He also took up the use of pastel, which was enjoying a revival among artists. Through its soft, blurring effects and subtle color, Twachtman explored reductive compositions of flat forms and sinuous outline deeply influenced by Japanese woodcut prints.

Searching for a locale in which to settle and paint, Twachtman traveled throughout the eastern United States in the late 1880s. He joined the art colony at Cos Cob, on the Connecticut shore, a center for the development of impressionism, which used of bright colors and broken brushwork to convey contemporary subject matter. Twachtman taught there and in New York City and undertook commercial art work to support his growing family; passionate in his search for a genuine artistic expression in his landscape painting, he refused to paint according to popular, lucrative formulas or to promote his work. While highly respected among his fellow artists, Twachtman never achieved much financial or critical success. Working closely with his friends, landscape painters Julian Alden Weir and Theodore Robinson, Twachtman pioneered an American impressionist aesthetic that was poetic and introspective, even moody, in its intimate compositions and delicate coloration. In 1897, Twachtman was among the impressionist artists who broke from the more conventional Society of American Artists to form Ten American Painters.

In 1889, Twachtman settled with his family on a farm in then-rural Greenwich, Connecticut. Painted under varying conditions of weather and light, his house and grounds, especially a modest stream and waterfall there, would be a constant source of subjects for the remainder of his career. He also worked in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and created commissioned views of Yellowstone Park and Niagara Falls. When he died suddenly of a brain aneurysm shortly after his forty-ninth birthday, Twachtman, bitter and reclusive, was relatively little-known beyond his artistic circle, but his important legacy as an original interpreter of impressionism is now acknowledged.