Sunday, June 06, 1999
Artist strived for fresh vision
Cincinnati native left to broaden scope of his art
BY OWEN FINDSEN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
The child of German immigrants, John Henry Twachtman grew up in a house at 14th and Race streets in Over-the-Rhine.
He studied with Cincinnati's famed professor of German realism, Frank Duveneck, at a free evening class at the Ohio Mechanics Institute. The two became lifelong friends.
Cincinnati is a “very old foggied place,” Twachtman wrote to a friend in 1881. “There is no good art influence here and I shall be glad to leave.”
Like scores of artists before and since, Twachtman thought of Cincinnati as a good place from which to be, and the days he spent drawing and painting in rural Mount Auburn were pivotal in the development of his art.
He was a founder of the society known as “The Ten,” a group of painters, also including Childe Hassam and Cincinnatian Joseph DeCamp. The Ten dominated American painting at the turn of the 20th Century, often exhibiting together.
In 1875, Twachtman followed Duveneck to Munich where he was trained in the Munich method of dark, bravura brushwork.
He took that style with him to Venice and used it in the Avondale landscapes painted when he returned to Cincinnati in 1879 to teach at the Women's Art Museum Association.
In Cincinnati, he concentrated on etchings, mostly done in the rural areas of Avondale, where he lived with Cincinnati artist Martha Scudder, whom he married in 1881.
Except for trips to Holland and France, where he was exposed to the new paintings of the French Impressionists, he divided his time between New York and New England for the rest of his life.
He kept his ties with Cincinnati, returning to visit family and to show his paintings at Closson's Gallery. He shared an exhibition with his son Alden, also a painter, at the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1901.
In 1889, he bought a country house called Round Hill at Greenwich, Conn., where he lived until his death.
Twachtman would line up his children in front of a scene he planned to paint and ask them to describe what they saw, knowing that they would not look at a scene as an example of a painting technique, but would see with what he called “an original mind.”
“That does not mean to compose things,” he said, “but to find what nature holds in infinite variety.”
His paintings never sold well during his lifetime, partly because he was indifferent about selling them.
“He never sacrificed his vision to become commercially viable,” said Judy Larson, director of the Western Virginia Museum of Art and curator of the exhibition. His income came mostly from teaching at the Art Students League in New York and at the artists' colony at Cos Cob, Conn.
During the last two years of his life, he renewed his friendship with Duveneck, while the two painted together in the summer at Gloucester. It was as brief moment of resolution for the two old friends, with Duveneck adding some of Twachtman's color and Twachtman reverting to some of Duveneck's brushwork.
It ended when Twachtman died of a brain aneurysm in 1902, four days after his 49th birthday.
Twachtman's star began to rise when his painting “Arques la Bataille” was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in the 1970s. The museum praised it as one of the most important paintings in their American collection.
As the century ends, Cincinnati Art Museum is showing Twachtman's art just as it did 99 years ago in 1900. Another Twachtman exhibition, in 1966, is recalled by art lovers as one of the most memorable CAM exhibitions. Even its catalog is a rare collector's item.
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