John Henry Twachtman
American, 1853 - 1902
Birth-PlaceCincinnati, OH
Death-PlaceGloucester, MA
BiographyJohn Twachtman was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and grew up in the heart of Over-the-Rhine, the city's German district. He began studying art in 1868 at the Ohio Mechanics' Institute. In 1871 he transferred to the McMicken School of Design (later the Cincinnati Art Academy), where he was a part-time student for five years. The most significant influence on his early career was his contemporary Frank Duveneck, who had recently returned to Cincinnati from Munich. Twachtman attended a night class Duveneck taught at the Ohio Mechanics' Institute in the winter of 1874-75. When Duveneck returned to Munich in the summer of 1875, Twachtman went with him. In October of that year Twachtman enrolled at the Munich Royal Academy. He adopted a dynamic realist approach inspired by the contemporary German painter Wilhelm Leibl and by the Spanish and Flemish Old Masters. The images Twachtman created during a trip to Venice in 1877-78 with Duveneck and William Merritt Chase established him as a prominent figure in the American avant-garde. Returning to America in 1878, Twachtman settled in New York, where he created images of the harbors and of the shore near Jersey City.
In fall 1879 Twachtman moved to Cincinnati and joined the faculty of the Women's Art Museum Association as an instructor of drawing and oil painting. In October of the following year, he departed again for Europe, taking a position at the art school Duveneck had established in Florence and creating images that reflect the influence of the Barbizon School.
In April 1881 Twachtman married art student Martha Scudder in Cincinnati. In the early summer the couple embarked on a honeymoon visiting England, Holland, Germany, and Italy. Back in Cincinnati at the end of 1881, Twachtman moved to the suburb of Avondale and painted the forested hillsides.
By the time Twachtman left for Europe in fall 1883, he had largely left his Munich style behind. From 1883 to 1885 he studied at the Académie Julian in Paris with Gustave Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefébvre and spent summers painting in the countrysides in Normandy and Holland. His works reflect the influence of the plein-air canvases of Jules Bastien-Lepage, the decorative schemes of James McNeill Whistler, Japanese prints, and the Hague School.
Following his return from Europe in January 1886, Twachtman probably joined his wife in Cincinnati and spent time on Pelee Island, Ontario. By fall 1886 he was hired to work in Chicago on a cyclorama of the Battle of Gettysburg, which was first displayed in Pittsburgh in June 1887. The next fall or winter he left Cincinnati permanently, and around the winter of 1889 he first visited the area near Greenwich, Connecticut. Finding the landscape ideally suited to his art, he settled with his family in an old farmhouse on Round Hill Road, two miles north of the town. During the years that followed, he taught drawing classes in New York at the Art Students League and, after 1894, at the Cooper Union School of Design and painted the countryside where he lived. He was a founding member of the Ten American Painters in 1897.
During his Greenwich years Twachtman adopted an individualistic Impressionist approach with which he captured the subtleties of nature in every season with expressive color and brushwork and unusual compositions that reveal his understanding of the principles of design. In winter 1893-94 he painted views of Niagara Falls, and in fall 1895 he received a commission for a group of views of Yellowstone National Park.
Twachtman's style changed again during his last three summers, which he spent in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Encouraged by the lively artists' colony around him, he abandoned the elaborate layering methods he had been using in Greenwich and began to paint in an alla prima fashion, applying vibrant pigments directly and forcibly to the canvas without retouching. He died in Gloucester at age forty-nine.
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