Niagara in Winter

Artist John Henry Twachtman (American, 1853 - 1902)

Datec. 1893

MediumOil on canvas

Dimensions30 1/8 x 25 1/8 in. (76.5 x 63.8 cm)
Frame Dimension: 39 1/4 × 34 1/8 × 3 in. (99.7 × 86.7 × 7.6 cm)

ClassificationsOil Painting

Credit LineHarriet Russell Stanley Fund

Terms

Object number1947.37

DescriptionFollowing its initial portrayal in seventeenth-century guidebooks to the New World, Niagara Falls became the most recognizable landscape motif associated with North
America. (1) It was depicted in paintings, engravings, stereo photographs, commemorative coins, and wallpaper. Fine artists began to take up the subject in the late 1700s, and early in the next century, such prominent artists as John Vanderlyn, John Trumbull, and Alvan Fisher were establishing precedents for how it was to be seen. Their images emphasized the force and drama of the falls, showing them in Romantic terms as representations of awesome Sublimity and divine might.
From the 1830s through the 1850s the Hudson River School artists Thomas Cole, John Frederick Kensett, Jasper Cropsey, and Albert Bierstadt portrayed the falls, but the quintessential depiction was the painting created by Frederic Church's Niagara (1857; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). The large scale, frightening vantage point, and surging waters of Church's painting have come to be associated with the nation's spirit during an era of optimism.
Perhaps choosing not to rival Church, artists of later decades were less ambitious in their representations of the falls. They sought new approaches to the subject, depicting it from unusual angles and with techniques that were individualistic as well as inspired by recent currents in European painting. Among the prominent artists of the late nineteenth century who portrayed the falls were William Morris Hunt, Thomas Moran, George Inness, and Twachtman.
While Niagara may have been an unusual subject for Hunt and Inness, who generally focused on intimate rural landscapes rendered in styles influenced by the Barbizon School, it was an especially curious choice for Twachtman, who had avoided popular subjects and historical landmarks, especially those that had a long history of artistic representation. Indeed, there were only a few instances during Twachtman's Greenwich years when he did not portray the grounds of his own home-his Niagara scenes of 1893-94, his Yellowstone views of 1895, and his Gloucester paintings of 1900-1902. Recent sources have mistakenly suggested that the Niagara paintings were commissioned, thus explaining the uncharacteristic subject. The commissioner was thought to have been Dr. Charles Cary, a professor of anatomy at the University of Buffalo. Cary, however, appears simply to have been Twachtman's host in Buffalo during the artist's trip to the falls.
Twachtman clearly had visited the falls by winter 1893-94, since he showed a winter scene entitled "Horseshoe Falls, Niagara-Afternoon" at a National Academy of Design exhibition that opened on April 2, 1894. This painting could be the New Britain canvas or the "Horseshoe Falls, Niagara." (Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, N.Y.) A diary entry for March 9, 1895, by artist Theodore Robinson suggests that Twachtman traveled north again in summer 1894: "P.m. to Twachtman's--saw one of his Niagara's done last summer--a charming thing and very complete--light, mysterious." (2)
Financial duress during his Greenwich years may have prompted Twachtman's decision to paint Niagara, a "salable" subject. Yet he did not paint conventional views of Niagara, and none of his six known depictions of the site sold during his lifetime. A more likely stimulus was simply his interest in waterfalls as a subject. Twachtman had begun painting the waterfall on his property in the early 1890s, and his images of Niagara are surprisingly similar to these Greenwich scenes, despite the great differences in the scales of the two cascades. Ironically, several of Twachtman's Greenwich paintings convey the sense that the small waterfall on Horseneck Brook-which is actuality about six feet high-is a grand torrent falling from a steep cliff, while his views of Niagara present a waterfall far smaller than the famed cataract. It appears Twachtman purposely obfuscated issues of scale in order to concentrate the viewer's attention on the sensuousness of the subject.
Twachtman's four best-known paintings of the falls show them from the western/Canadian side of the gorge below Table Rock. (3) He probably reached this popular spot, a must for tourists, by traveling on the Maid-of-the-Mist Ferry and then taking the elevator, installed about
1891. (4) To look up at the falls from the angle shown in his paintings, he would have had to walk out onto precarious rocks, covered with snow during the winter, and set up his easel, surrounded by vaporous air and splashed by water hitting the rocks below. In "Niagara in Winter" and "Horseshoe Falls, Niagara," Twachtman seems to have stood directly below Table Rock. In both works, the balance of triangular shapes results in compositions that are decorative yet not stylized, as the paintings are suffused with rhythmically applied touches of lavender, green, and blue that suggest transparent veils of shifting light, moisture, and water. Looking at these works, the viewer is caught up in an ethereal moment, when physical reality takes on transcendent dimensions.
During his lifetime, critics generally did not understand Twachtman's achievement. Although one called his Niagara works "true and magnificent," (5) others condemned them for missing the point of his subject. Writing about "Niagara," shown at the 1900 exhibition of the Ten American Painters in Boston, a reviewer remarked: "Those who are familiar with Mr. Twachtman's graceful, delicate, sensuous . . . manner of painting will be surprised to see, as one of his pictures in this exhibition, a representation of Niagara Falls. They will be less surprised at the result, which is singularly small and futile, as though a deaf man, oblivious to the appalling thunder of the cataract, had been the artist. Strength and power are surely the dominant notes in Niagara, and he who ignores them misses what seems the very essence of the subject." (6) Later critics were more appreciative of the Niagara paintings, concurring with John Cournos who stated in 1914 that Twachtman's "eye conceived Niagara as a poetic vision." (7)
Of Twachtman's Niagara works, the New Britain painting has received the most praise. In the 1913 catalogue for the estate sale of New Yorker William T. Evans, Niagara in Winter was singled out as a picture in which "the artist did not attempt to express the vastness and majesty of the scene, but contented himself with rendering the lovely green and purple tones of the water with the surge and swirl below it. Critic Charles de Kay also took note of the painting: "All is fluid, all motion, all color. It takes a bold artist to so much as attempt to place the falls of Niagara on canvas, and it must be an unusual genius who can achieve a picture that even in a measure can reflect the grandeur of the scene. One can think of very able, clever and successful painters today and in the past who are and were unable to paint water in motion so as to give satisfaction to the exacting. Apparently one has to have a special gift to represent acceptably the rush of foam and the downward plunge of solid water. Twachtman had the gift as his Niagara pieces attest." (8)

LNP

Bibliography: Eliot C. Clark, "John Twachtman" (New York: privately printed, 1924); John Douglas Hale, "The Life and Creative Development of John H. Twachtman," 2 vols., Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, Columbus, 1957; Deborah Chotner, Lisa N. Peters, and Kathleen A. Pyne, "John Twachtman: Connecticut Landscapes," exhib. cat. (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1989); Lisa N. Peters et al., "In the Sunlight: The Floral and Figurative Art of J. H. Twachtman," exhib. cat. (New York: Spanierman Gallery, 1989); Lisa N. Peters, "John Twachtman (1853-1902) and the American Scene in the Late Nineteenth Century: The Frontier within the Terrain of the Familiar," Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1995.

Notes:

1.For a comprehensive discussion of artists' views of Niagara Falls and how the subject has been perceived historically, see Jeremy Elwell Adamson et al., Niagara: Two Centuries of Changing Attitudes, 1697-1901, exhib. cat. (Washington, D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1985).
2. Theodore Robinson Diaries, Frick Art Reference Library, New York.
3. The other three paintings are Niagara Gorge (oil on canvas, 30 x 30 in., private collection), Niagara (oil on canvas, 20 x 16 in., Brooklyn Museum of Art), and Niagara Falls (oil on canvas, 30 x 30 in., private collection).
4. I would like to thank Daniel Dumych, Niagara Falls Public Library, for help in identifying Twachtman's vantage point and access to the falls.
5. E. A. F., Chicago Journal, January 12, 1901; Ryerson Library Archives, Art Institute of Chicago.
6. "Art Notes: Ten American Painters and Their Third Annual Exhibition at the Durand-Ruel Gallery," New York Mail and Express, March 21, 1900, p. 9.
7. John Cournos, "John H. Twachtman," Forum 52 (August 1914): 245-48.
8. Charles de Kay, "John H. Twachtman," Art World and Arts and Decoration 9 (June 1918): 76.

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