Interpretive Resource

During the last decade of his life, John Twachtman painted numerous views of the landscape surrounding his home on Round Hill Road in Greenwich, Connecticut. He bought seventeen acres of property around 1890 and painted outside year round to capture the effects of the changing seasons on his carefully cultivated land. Icebound and The White Bridge depict two different spots on the artist’s property in winter and spring and demonstrate his changing formal response to each scene and time of year. Twachtman characterized the blanketed solitude of winter and the blossoming elegance of spring with varying compositional and paint handling effects that reveal his sensitivity to the natural world, Impressionistic tendencies, and commitment to representing his local landscape.

Like William Merritt Chase, Twachtman received his initial artistic training in Munich in the mid-1870s. After his return to the United States in 1878, Twachtman’s style evolved from one that made extensive use of the dark, heavy impastos characteristic of the Munich School to one favoring a lighter palette and thinner paint application and more in tune with modern French trends. To continue his instruction, Twachtman journeyed to Paris in 1883 and enrolled at the Académie Julian. Very few paintings survive from the years immediately following Twachtman’s Parisian training, but those that do exhibit a tonalist, Whistlerian sensibility applied to depictions of the natural world. Additionally, they express not only the artist’s involvement with Japanese aesthetics but also the popular idea that art could have a therapeutic effect on the lives of urban dwellers.

Icebound is one of Twachtman’s many Connecticut winter scenes that embody the idea of the season as conducive to contemplation and regeneration rather than as a dead, barren time. In fact, views of winter comprise the largest portion of Twachtman’s oeuvre, and most depict a frozen body of water. Icebound shows either Horseneck Brook or Hemlock Pool, two water holes that are part of a stream on the estate that he painted many times. In an often-quoted letter to fellow artist and close friend J. Alden Weir, Twachtman revealed his preference for the serenity of winter, writing: "We must have snow and lots of it. Never is nature more lovely than when it is snowing. Everything is so quiet and . . . All nature is hushed to silence."

The dense, gradually built-up layers of paint in Icebound mimic the accumulation of snow on the frozen ground, while the sinuous curves that define the snow and ice against the water suggest movement in an otherwise tranquil environment. The deep blue of the water and the orange leaves that linger on the trees are the most vivid notes of color in this otherwise monochromatic canvas. Almost square in format, the painting’s harmonious composition allows the viewer to contemplate the scene from several points of view one can consider the water either receding into the background or spilling out of the canvas along the bottom left corner. Icebound may have been exhibited at the Art Institute in 1889; one critic’s comments certainly correspond with the theme of the painting: "Mr. Twachtman’s contribution . . . is of a nearly square format well-suited to the scene of a frozen brook in winter. Impressionism has brought forth these soft lavenders and blues, and this loving adulation of the icy winter air."

The White Bridge, which Twachtman painted after Icebound, represents spring and depicts the bridge spanning Horseneck Brook. The artist built this bridge around 1895 and represented it at least five times over the course of the following seven years. Unlike the relatively opaque, evenly handled snow in Icebound, the scene in The White Bridge is sketchily rendered in feathery strokes of green and rich brown pigment with expanses of unprimed canvas showing through. The vitality and renewal of spring are suggested by the energetic, short brushstrokes and by the transparent layers of freshly budding vegetation that seems to grow before one’s eyes. The painting also demonstrates the artist’s growing skill as an Impressionist and his commitment to working en plein air in extreme weather.

Twachtman’s delight in depicting the same scenes again and again in different seasons, coupled with his loose handling and emphasis on effects of light, have prompted many to compare his work to that of Claude Monet. The comparison is apt considering that both men chose, in their later years, to explore the infinite and constantly changing beauty of a particular area that they continuously manicured, but Monet’s work in series was more structured than Twachtman’s. The French artist carefully choreographed his day, often working on more than one canvas, depending on the hour and the angle of the sun. Twachtman seems to have worked more haphazardly, producing far fewer works than his prodigious French contemporary. However, Twachtman’s work in Connecticut is significant in that it taps into the nascent "modernist" trend of examining a single subject from many points of view over time, creating a subtle range of effects within a limited framework.