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John Henry Twachtman Catalogue Raisonné
An online catalogue by Lisa N. Peters, Ph.D., in collaboration with the Greenwich Historical Society

Catalogue Entry

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Additional Images
Winter Landscape, 1883 (OP.526). OP.526, Winter Landscape, detail with signature.
OP.526, Winter Landscape, detail with signature.
Keywords
OP.526
Winter Landscape
1883
Oil on panel
10 5/8 x 16 1/8 in. (27 x 40.9 cm)
Signed and dated lower left: J. H. Twachtman– / 1883 [the end of signature has been partly rubbed off]
New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, Purchase (FA1985.20)
Provenance
(Macbeth);
to Gilbert S. McClintock, Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania;
bequest to the Art Museum, Princeton University, New Jersey, 1956;
through (Midtown Galleries, New York, received in trade);
to Mr. and Mrs. Alan Gruskin, 1970;
to Mrs. Alan Gruskin, 1970;
to present collection, 1985.
Exhibitions
1966 Cincinnati Art Museum
Cincinnati Art Museum, John Henry Twachtman: A Retrospective Exhibition, October 7–November 20, 1966. (Exhibition catalogue: Baskett 1966); (Exhibition catalogue: Boyle 1966–I), no. 23, as Winter Landscape, lent by the Midtown Galleries, New York.
1968 Spanierman
Ira Spanierman, New York, John Henry Twachtman, 1853–1902: An Exhibition of Paintings and Pastels, February 3–24, 1968, no. 7, as Winter Landscape, lent by Mr. and Mrs. Alan Gruskin.
1972 New Jersey State Museum
New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, Festival '72: Exhibition of Decorative and Fine Arts from New Jersey Private Collections and Fine Arts, Pre-Twentieth Century American and European Painting and Sculpture, May 20–June 25, 1972, as Winter Landscape, lent by Mrs. Alan D. Gruskin.
1988 New Jersey State Museum
New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, After Eden: American Landscapes, 1875-1925, May 21–September 4, 1988, p. 75 ill. in b/w, as Winter Landscape.
Literature
Hale 1957
Hale, John Douglass. "Life and Creative Development of John H. Twachtman." 2 vols. Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 1957. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1958, vol. 2, p. 579 (catalogue A, no. 741), as Winter Landscape. (Hale concordance).
Boyle 1966–II
Boyle, Richard, J. "The Paintings of John H. Twachtman." Cincinnati Enquirer, October 9, 1966, p. 23 ill. in b/w, as Winter Landscape.
Peters 1995
Peters, Lisa N. "John Twachtman (1853–1902) and the American Scene in the Late Nineteenth Century: The Frontier within the Terrain of the Familiar." 2 vols. Ph.D. dissertation, City University of New York, 1995. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International, 1996, vol. 1, p. 164; vol. 2, p. 699 ill. in b/w (fig. 160), as Winter Landscape.
Peters 1999–I
Peters, Lisa N. John Henry Twachtman: An American Impressionist. Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 1999. Exhibition catalogue (1999 High Museum of Art), pp. 56–57 ill. in b/w, as Winter Landscape.
Commentary

When Twachtman participated in an exhibition at Closson's Gallery in Cincinnati in February 1883, a critic commented that several of his landscapes were “painted from the window of his Avondale home.”[1] Rendered from an elevated vantage point, as if from the window on a building’s high floor, this painting fits such a description. In it, Twachtman depicted several upright and large homes, whose contours were made fully visible due to the bareness of the snow-covered landscape, which also revealed fences and terracing used for gardens in the summer. 

The painting's early history is unknown, but it was possibly the work exhibited at the 1884 Paris Salon with the title of L’hiver, en Amérique (no. 2321). Bertha Margaret Wright described it as follows:

John H. Twatchman [sic], of Cincinnati, shows a tiny canvas of colossal unloveliness, called “L’hiver en Amerique.” It is a “snowscape,” a white expanse, broken by spaces of withered grass, where the snow has melted or blown away. Two or three dreary, horrible American farmhouses, perfectly square, with square windows, caveless, flat-pitched roofs and no hints of decorative balcony, piazza, gable or portico—looking more like barns than human habitations—give one shivering realization of the sordid uncomeliness of the lives within, and deprive the scene of even such poetic melancholy as its purely elemental dreariness might otherwise have given it.[2]

The Salon painting received a much more favorable response from the critic William C. Brownell, who appreciated Twachtman’s candor: "Unpretending and . . . just in the rendering of delicate values was a tiny canvas by Mr. Twachtman, of which, moreover, the sentiment was poetic as well as pleasant, and positively beautiful as well as true. It was a snow-scene called 'L’Hiver en Amérique;' and 'skied' as it was, must have escaped every one who did not search for it."[3] 

Nonetheless, it is questionable that Twachtman would carry a work on panel with him to Paris and the identity of his 1884 Paris Salon painting has yet to be confirmed. 

[1] Cincinnati Enquirer 1883. 

[2] Wright 1884.

[3] Brownell 1884.