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

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Keywords
P.916
Spring
Alternate title: A Spring Idyll
ca. 1890–95
Pastel on oatmeal paper
14 x 11 in. (35.6 x 27.9 cm)
Signed lower left: J. H. Twachtman–
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
Literature
Kobbé 1917–II
Kobbé, Gustav. "American Water Color Painters." Mentor 5 (May 15, 1917), p. 4 ill. in b/w, as A Spring Idyll.
Phillips Collection 1952
The Phillips Collection: A Museum of Modern Art and Its Sources. Washington, D.C.: Phillips Collection, 1952, p. 102, as Spring.
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. 520 (catalogue G, no. 825, as Spring Idyll); 591 (catalogue A, no. 1021), as Spring. (Hale concordance).
Gerdts 1984
Gerdts, William H. American Impressionism. New York: Abbeville, 1984, p. 109 ill. in color, as Spring.
Commentary

Rendered on pumice paper, favored by the artist for its roughened sandpaper-like surface to which even the slightest amount of powdered pigment would adhere, this pastel depicts a view looking along the lower path that extended from the back of the artist’s Greenwich home to his barn, which is in the left distance.

The pastel was probably still in the artist’s estate when the American music critic and former member of the Tile Club, Gustav Kobbé (1857–1918) illustrated it as A Spring Idyll in his 1917 article on American watercolor painters. Kobbé wrote: “Exquisite is the work of John H. Twachtman. Most delicate and poetic interpretations of landscape, often his work seems a color poem, or only a dream; and if but a dream, do you not feel, nevertheless, that it may come true at any bend of a road of a misty morning? Vague, nebulous at first, the trees and bushes, the stretch of ground leading up, maybe to a little house, the hills beyond gradually take shape, without obtruding themselves, through the infinitely delicate veil of atmosphere that hangs over the scene. Such a work by Twachtman is an evocation, a poem; and, if you wish it so, a spring poem, lightly made captive in stanzas of palest rose, green, and blue.”

Duncan Phillips acquired the work for the Phillips Collection in 1921, in part for the season it represented. In his collection, where it became known just as Spring, it joined three other images characterizing different seasons by Twachtman.