Winter Landscape

John Leslie Breck’s Winter Landscape straightforwardly records a section of gently sloping snow-covered ground sparsely populated by white birches, evergreens, and yellow grasses under a brilliant blue sky. The chill, deserted scene appears arbitrarily selected for its unpretentious ordinariness, with its clumps of vegetation randomly distributed throughout the composition. Their vertical emphases are balanced by the delicate traces of purple shadow they cast and the rising line of the edge of the open ground bounded on the horizon by denser woods. What appears a simple slice of the natural world may be in fact an abandoned swathe of farmland slowly being reclaimed by nature, for a vestige of a low stone wall, a typical marker of property boundaries in rural New England, snakes across the distant edge of the field in the right distance.

Winter Landscape is thought to be one of a group of paintings Breck made during the winter of 1892–93 at his family’s farm in West Rutland, Massachusetts. Raised in Boston from the age of five, the artist returned to his adopted home state in 1892 after five years of painting intermittently in the rural village of Giverny, in Normandy, France. There, he worked closely with French painter Claude Monet (1840–1926), master of the manner known as impressionism, the use of distinct brushstrokes of bright color to suggest the vibrating effects of shifting light and atmosphere. As evidenced by the paintings Breck made in Giverny, many of which are now in the Terra Foundation’s collection, he was an enthusiastic convert to the new mode. The loose brushwork, strong light and color, and intimate landscape subject of Winter Landscape demonstrate Breck’s continuing commitment to an impressionist approach after he returned permanently to the United States.

In the 1890s Breck was one of many American painters who applied impressionist techniques to the portrayal of local, distinctly American subjects. For these artists, the theme of the landscape in winter was particularly important. Such works as Winter Landscape (TF 1992.136) by John Henry Twachtman and Spring Thaw (TF 1999.85) by Earnest Lawson approach the subtle gradations of reductive white-on-white not only as a formal challenge but as an opportunity for exploring nature—and by extension its portrayal—as a subjective expression of the artist’s inner world. Such art also has been interpreted as a conscious retreat from the clamorous realities of modern urban life: in painting the hushed, chill purity of the snow-blanketed landscape, Breck and other American impressionists evoked an ideal world in which human enterprise appears expunged. Winter Landscape, however, subtly alludes to ancestral memory embodied in the rural Massachusetts landscape. The rustic fence straggling across the partly open ground in the right distance, a remnant of the site’s now-forgotten character as productive agricultural land, evokes the traditional values associated with New England for which many of Breck’s contemporaries yearned in an era of economic and social turmoil.

Gerdts, William H. et al. Lasting Impressions: American Painters in France, 1865–1915. (exh. cat., Musée d'Art Américain Giverny). Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 1992. Text pp. 51, 146–47; fig. 43, p. 51 (black & white).

Gerdts, William H. et al. Impressions de toujours: les peintres américains en France, 1865–1915. (exh. cat., Musée d'Art Américain Giverny). Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 1992. Text pp. 51, 146–47; fig. 43, p. 51 (black & white).