French Landscape

Closely related to the painting Road Near Honfleur (TF 1989.15), John Henry Twachtman's etching French Landscape depicts the same curving road thought to be the coastal route between the towns of Trouville and Honfleur in the French Atlantic province of Normandy. For the print, Twachtman freely sketched the rural scene onto a small etching plate. With irregular, scratchy, and scribbled lines and dots, he depicted a roadway winding around a thatched cottage and continuing past several trees, including two poplars silhouetted against the sky. During the process of etching or biting the lines into the plate, accidental splotchy effects occurred where the acid slightly corroded some unprotected areas of the plate surface. Twachtman exploited the resulting tones for texture to articulate the otherwise nondescript foreground terrain, complementing the parallel lines that describe the cottage roof and foliage.

Compositionally, this print and the painting Road Near Honfleur are fairly similar, although the print is slightly more vertical in orientation and lacks a distant tree shown in the painting on the horizon at left. Where the painting features broadly painted swathes of color to indicate the forms of trees, cottage, land, and clouds, the print relies on dense lines and tones of black and white to translate the landscape to an intimate scale. The historical relationship between the two works is unclear. The print may have been created as an etched version of the already completed painting or from a sketch as another means of study for the painting. The free handling of trees and landscape offers a third possibility: that Twachtman etched the plate spontaneously, on-site before his subject, and made the painting later.

The Studio of Nature, 1860-1910: The Terra Collection in Context (L’atelier de la Nature, 1860-1910. Invitation à la Terra Collection). Terra Foundation for American Art with the Musée des Impressionnismes Giverny (organizers). Venue: Musée des Impressionnismes Giverny, France, September 12, 2020–January 3, 2021. [exh. cat. in French]

Wickenden, Robert J. The Art and Etchings of John Henry Twachtman. New York: Frederick Keppel and Company, 1921, pp. 20–30.

Baskett, Mary Welsh. John Henry Twachtman: American Impressionist Painter as a Printmaker; A Catalogue Raisonné of His Prints. New York: M. Hausberg, 1999. No. 17, pp. 95–96.Bourguignon, Katherine and Valerie Reis. The Studio of Nature, 1860-1910: The Terra Collection in Context. (exh. cat, Terra Foundation for American Art with the Musée des Impressionnismes Giverny). Paris, France: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2020.  Pl. 44, p. 114 (color).