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With the way critics spoke about the work of John Henry Twachtman, you’d be forgiven for believing his canvases to possess the fragility of a house of cards. References to his brush’s light, delicate, whispering qualities abound—“not fit for the struggle of life in a contemporary exhibition gallery,” proclaimed one writer at the New York Times 1899 in what was actually a positive review that nonetheless seemed concerned Twachtman’s subtlety would go straight over the heads of the average gallery-goer. But Darwinian evolution doesn’t always choose the flashiest bird to propel into the future; sometimes it’s the ones with a quieter magic, like camouflage, or a nest-full of blue trinkets hidden deep in the woods. The quasi-tonalist works from the last decade of Twachtman’s life, the ones he has come to be best known for, are like this—sitting with a man as the steam on the lake burns away, convincing you to just wait, just wait one more second, there’s something special just around the corner. Twachtman first fell in love with Connecticut’s landscape while he was visiting his friend and fellow artist Julian Alden Weir in 1888 at his Branchville home. Twachtman’s ventures in Munich, Venice, Paris, and Normandy during the 1870s and 80s had taken his work on a roller coaster from his initial moody realism to a smoother and mutedly brighter approach. But it was the soft pastoralism of New England that flipped some internal switch, tipping his art into that light, opaque, textured final phase. Weir and Twachtman spent the summer of ‘88 winding through the grounds of Weir’s property, stopping short whenever they encountered a sight worth commemorating in pastels. Two years later, Twachtman bought three acres of land in nearby Greenwich. That way, he figured, he could stop and commemorate for as long as he liked. “Landscape, Connecticut” marries the purer tonalism of Twachtman’s mid-1880s French period—with its limited, silvery palettes and calm blocks of color playing across the frame—with his later experimentations in translating the textured immediacy of pastel into oil paints. The mighty curve of what is likely Horseneck Brook leads the viewer back toward the horizon for a spell, but it’s a path quickly disoriented by the riffled brushstrokes of the land’s reflection in the water; eventually all we can see is a single horizontal line of light blue beneath the deeper green of distant trees, until that, too, disappears in a hushed flash of purple-grey. This atmospheric effect that simultaneously compels you to lean in even as it pitches the painting toward abstraction was something Twachtman achieved through a dense impasto covered by layer upon layer of thin glazes bleached in sunlight, a heightened light exposure that manages to obscure far more than it reveals. “I feel more and more contented with the isolation of country life…I can see now how necessary it is to live always in the country—at all seasons of the year,” Twachtman wrote in an 1891 letter to Weir. As Twachtman was recording the passage of time and light at his Roundhill Road home, though, he was also modifying the scenery itself (planting trees, building bridges, damming the brook to make a wading pool for his wife and children). What at first carries the feeling of nature in its untouched form in “Landscape, Connecticut” unfolds into hints of Twachtman’s meddling: the vertical symmetry dividing the top and bottom halves, the perfect shape echoes of the middle and background trees, the even parallels of the water’s edges. It is an essence both innate and constructed, a meditation on the powers we have to tinker with the world around us and the things we must cede to time. Flecks of bright blue dart across the surface, like a hurried breeze moving through some deeper past, a secret of the land less prone to whims and shifts. Turn away, then turn back. Is it the same? Are you sure? If you would like to inquire about this work, head here.
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