John Henry Twachtman John H. Twachtman does not have an image.

John Henry Twachtman
Painter
American, (1853–1902)
John Henry Twachtman was introduced to art by his German-immigrant father, who painted landscapes and still-lifes on window shades. The younger Twachtman began working at the window-shade factory at age fourteen, meanwhile taking night courses in drawing at the Ohio Mechanics Institute. He enrolled at the McMicken School of Design in 1871, where one of his instructors was the Munich-trained artist Frank Duveneck, who eventually took him as a private student. Following the pattern of American artists of his period, Twachtman went to Europe to complete his studies, working at Munich’s Royal Academy from 1875-77. The following year he painted in Venice with Duveneck and William Merritt Chase. The paintings of this early, or Munich, period are characterized by dark colors thickly applied. Twachtman showed one typically brownish-black example to a friend years later, chuckling, "That is sunny Venice, done under the influence of the Munich school."

The artist made a conscious effort to rid himself of the somber Munich palette and to improve his drawing by enrolling in the Academie Julian in Paris in 1883. Together with his wife, who was a painter and etcher, he lived in Paris from 1883-85, spending the holidays painting in the French countryside with such new friends as Childe Hassam, Theodore Robinson, and Willard Metcalf. The paintings from this transitional, or French period (which lasted until the late 1880s) were the artists most popular during his lifetime. The paint is applied in thin washes; the color range is limited to cool , silvery greens and grays; the composition is simplified , tending toward abstraction, and the predominant influences seem to be Oriental art and the American expatriate James McNeill Whistler. Despite its relative popularity, however, Twachtman rejected the style as "too easy."

It was not until he settled in Greenwich in the late 1880s that Twachtman developed his mature, individual style. The paintings of Twachtman’s Greenwich period are characterized by a brighter palette, apparently influenced by Theodore Robinson’s experience of French Impressionism. As important as any purely artistic influence, however, was Twachtman’s discovery of a landscape which personally suited his personal vision. The intimate scale of the Greenwich countryside and its varied but not extreme seasonal changes married perfectly with the artist’s sensitivity to nuances of color and mood. Unlike French Impressionists, who travelled from one scenic village to another in search of the picturesque, Twachtman found ample inspiration on his own seventeen-acre farm on Round Hill Road. Again and again he painted his simple farmhouse, with the new portico Stanford White designed for it; the brook just beyond, which cascaded over the rocks and formed a hidden moss-rimmed pool; the white lattice bridge he built at the head of the pool; and even the cabbage patch he and his wife had in their garden. Although he painted the same scene in all seasons, he especially enjoyed the winter landscapes, both for the challenge of exploring the variations of white and for the natural abstraction of form under a blanket of snow. (He never sold this farm, as some have reported. It was his joy - and the main subject of his art until he died.)

Twachtman attracted other artists to the Greenwich area when he established summer painting classes in Cos Cob in about 1890. J. Alden Weir, whom Twachtman had met in Paris in 1876, often shared the instruction, and the two close friends visited back and forth between Greenwich and Weir’s place in Branchville. Before settling in Greenwich, Twachtman had spent the summer of 1888 in Branchville near Weir, where they had experimented with etching on a press Weir had acquired. Twachtman became especially fond of the harbor area of Bridgeport and executed prints of scenes there, either before or shortly after he moved to Greenwich. Ten years or so later he could have easily visited Weir at Windham, for in 1898 Twachtman served as the instructor at Norwich of the first summer school of the Art Students League ever held outside New York City.

Twachtman’s final, or Gloucester, period is named for the Massachusetts town where he conducted summer classes in 1900, 1901, and 1902. The pictures of the last two years of his life, whether painted in Greenwich, Cos Cob, or Gloucester, mark a return to the use of black - - nearly abandoned since his youthful Munich period – the new use of brighter colors with greater value contrasts, and more forceful brushwork.

Twachtman was a painter’s painter, always admired by fellow artists and knowledgeable amateurs. He never achieved financial success or approval by the established critics during his lifetime. He was never elected to the National Academy, although Weir proposed his name repeatedly. He was a member of the Society of American Artists, the New York Etching Club, the Tile Club, the Players Club, and a founder of The Ten. He died in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1902, at the age of forty-nine.

Further reading:
Boyle, Richard J. John Henry Twachtman. N.Y.: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1979.
Hale, John Douglas. "The Life and Creative Development of John H. Twachtman." PHD Dissertation, Ohio State University, 1957.
Available from University Microfilms.
John Henry Twachtman Exh. cat., Cincinnati Art Museum, 1966.
Ryerson, Margery. "John H. Twachtman’s Etchings." Art in America, 8 (Feb. 1920), 92-96.