Gavin Spanierman 2012

The Pond, Weir Farm, 1889 Oil on canvas 30 x 25 inches Signed lower left: JH Twachtman JOHN HENRY TWACHTMAN (1853– 1902) John Henry Twachtman was born in 1853 in Cincinnati, Ohio. The son of German immigrants, Twachtman worked alongside his father at a window shade design firm in his youth. At age eighteen, he enrolled in the School of Design at the Ohio Me- chanic Institute. While studying there, he attended a night class instructed by Frank Duveneck. Twachtman later transferred to the McMicken School of Design, where Kenyon Cox, Joseph De Camp and Lewis Henry Meakin became his classmates. Duveneck continued to mentor Twachtman and invited him to paint in his studio. When Duveneck traveled to Munich to teach at the Munich Royal Academy in 1875, Twachtman accompanied him, as did De Camp. Twachtman enrolled at the Munich Royal Academy, where he was instructed by the Realist genre painter Ludwig von Loefftz. After two years at the Academy, Twachtman left for Venice, Italy, in the company of Duveneck and William Merritt Chase. Twachtman remained in Venice for only nine months before returning to America, where he settled in New York City. In 1878, he participated in the first exhibi- tion of the Society of American Artists, which later elected him as a member in 1880. During this period of residence in New York, the artist devoted himself to painting the harbor in a Realist manner. In 1879, Twachtman briefly returned to Cincinnati to take a teaching position at the Women’s Art Association before de- parting for Florence, Italy, where Duveneck had established a school. Twachtman was welcomed by the small group of painters who had gathered there, including Otto Bacher, Oliver Dennett Grover, Louis Ritter, Theodore Wendel, and Joseph De Camp. This artist collective became known as the “Duveneck Boys.” Twachtman returned to Cincinnati in 1881 to marry Martha Scudder. The newlyweds spent their honeymoon in Europe, primarily in Holland, where they joined Julian Alden Weir and his brother, fellow painter John Ferguson Weir. As time passed, Twachtman grew increasingly dissatisfied with the draftsman style of the Munich Academy and eventu- ally enrolled at the Académie Julian in Paris in 1883. He entered the ateliers of Gustave Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre, where he encountered fellow American painters Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf, Frank W. Benson, Edmund C. Tarbell, and Robert Reid. The friendships established among the men at the Académie would be maintained for the rest of their lives. Twachtman’s style shifted dramatically during his residence in Paris; influenced by the French Impressionists’ plein air painting techniques and exposure to Japanese prints, he began to paint more fluidly, resulting in a progression towards less evident brushwork. After three formative years abroad, Twachtman took a commission in Chicago for the execution of a cyclorama depict- ing the Battle of Gettysburg before he eventually settled in Connecticut. He and his family resided briefly at Weir’s farm in Branchville before moving to their own farm in Greenwich. From the late 1880s through the early 1890s, Twachtman executed illustrations for Scribner’s Magazine as a means of raising enough income to support his growing family and the continued renovation of his farm house. He cultivated large flower gardens and constructed water pools; the farm, its gardens and the surrounding countryside became his primary subject matter during the 1890s. His work became increasingly impres- sionistic as he utilized shorter, more aggressive brushstrokes; he also began mixing his colors directly on the canvas. Art historians believe this second stylistic shift to the impressionistic mode was the result of his friendships with other Impres- sionists, in particular Theodore Robinson, a close friend of Claude Monet. An interest in compositional design also emerged in Twachtman’s work during this period. In 1897, Twachtman joined his friends in their disavowal of the Society of American Artists, becoming one of the founding members of the Ten American Painters. In the following years, he began summering in Gloucester, Massachusetts, with Duve- neck. The works he created during these trips are an amalgamation of his previous periods, merging the painterly brushwork of the Munich Academy with a bold Impressionist palette. Sadly, Twachtman died unexpectedly in 1901 during one of his summer stays in Gloucester.