John Twachtman

John Twachtman was born in Cincinnati. His first artistic efforts were painting floral window shades for his father's business and training at the Ohio Mechanics Institute. In 1874 he studied at the Cincinnati School of Design with Frank Duveneck, who sent him in 1875 to Munich, where he worked with Ludwig von Loefftz at the Royal Academy. In 1877 Twachtman went with Duveneck and William Merritt Chase to Venice and from 1883 to 1885 Twachtman was instructed by Jules Lefebvre and Louis Boulanger at the Académie Julian in Paris, where he was influenced by the paintings of James Abbott McNeill Whistler and the French Impressionists, and became friends with Childe Hassam and Theodore Robinson. We see in French River Scene, 1884, how Whistler impacted his extremely modern approach to landscape painting.

In 1888 Twachtman settled in Connecticut where the core of his work was executed. That same year he won the landscape prize for the Society of American Artists, and in 1889 he had a successful two-man show with J. Alden Weir. He then acquired property in Greenwich, CT and taught at the Art Students League. With Weir and Hassam he helped found the American Impressionist group called The Ten in 1898.

Twachtman's artistic evolution began with a naturalism based on the earth tones and the fluid brushwork he learned from Frank Duveneck and the Munich school, progressing through the muted harmonies and abstract patterning of Whistler, and finally comprehending more closely than any other American landscape painter the mature Impressionism of Claude Monet. Twachtman's pictures lack Monet's scale or symphonic fullness, but they emulate some of the Frenchman's subtleties of perception, densely woven color harmonies, built-up impasto, and broken brushwork.

Twachtman’s landscapes center around a principal, generally darker, motif which forms a calligraphic flourish and focus, often connected to the picture's diagonal axes. His simple-looking somewhat complex compositions utilize the use of blue, grays and greens with hints of yellow to exemplify nature’s subtle nuances and effervescent changes. Twachtman wrote to Weir: ". . . I feel more and more contented with the isolation of country life. To be isolated is a fine thing and we are all then nearer to nature. 1 can see how necessary it is to live always in the country-at all seasons of the year."

Twachtman's use of the word "isolation" is instructive, since his work generally is devoid of figures and depicts the countryside and its atmospheric effects. Critics agree Twachtman’s poetic, delicate brushwork and modern approach to painting were ahead of their time and he was one of the catalysts toward Modernism and it was the art world’s loss that the master died so young in Greenwich in 1902.