Inner Harbor, Bridgeport

John Henry Twachtman's etching Inner Harbor, Bridgeport (Small Plate) depicts weathered wharf buildings, a rowboat at near right, and wooden mooring posts rising above the water's gently rippling surface. Areas of unprinted paper evoke the sky and water, unmarked apart from a few squiggly lines. This print is one of a group of paintings, pastels, watercolors, and etchings inspired by the coastal town of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Twachtman regularly visited it during the summer of 1888, when he rented a house in nearby Branchville close to the farm owned by his good friend and fellow artist J. Alden Weir; the following year, Twachtman and his family settled permanently in Greenwich, which was convenient for his further explorations of Connecticut scenery. Inner Harbor, Bridgeport (Small Plate) attests to Twachtman's attraction to waterfront scenery, as also demonstrated in such works as his etchings Holland Dykes (TF 1996.71) and Harbor at Night (TF 1996.51).

This faint impression, printed from an etching plate drawn with wispy, lightly-bitten lines, testifies to Twachtman's struggle with etching technique. He encountered difficulties as the acid etched the lines into the plate: the etching ground inadequately protected the plate from the acid, resulting in imperfections, particularly near the composition's center. After printing only three impressions on Weir's printing press, Twachtman abandoned this plate. Instead, he redrew and re-etched the same harbor scene onto another, larger plate for the more fully realized print entitled Inner Harbor, Bridgeport (Large Plate) (Baskett, no. 26).

Baskett, Mary Welsh. John Henry Twachtman: American Impressionist Painter as a Printmaker; A Catalogue Raisonné of His Prints. New York: M. Hausberg, 1999. Text no. 25, p. 110. [specific reference to Terra print]