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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
Mother and Child, ca. 1897 (OP.968). Fig. 1. Twachtman house, living room, ca. 1902, Greenwich Historical Society.
Fig. 1. Twachtman house, living room, ca. 1902, Greenwich Historical Society.
Related Work
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Keywords
OP.968
Mother and Child
Alternate title: Martha Twachtman and Daughter, Violet
ca. 1897
Oil on canvas
45 1/2 x 36 in. (115.6 x 91.4 cm)
Inscribed: "Twachtman" [in pencil on back of picture on stretcher]
Collection of Sharon P. and John D. Rockefeller IV
Provenance
Violet Twachtman Baker, the artist's daughter;
by descent in the family;
to (Spanierman);
to present collection, 1989.
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. 50, as Mother and Child, lent by Mr. James Baker, New York.
1989 Spanierman
Spanierman Gallery, New York, In the Sunlight: The Floral and Figurative Art of J. H. Twachtman, May 10–June 10, 1989. (Exhibition catalogue: Boyle 1989); (Exhibition catalogue: Gerdts 1989); (Exhibition catalogue: Spanierman 1989); (Exhibition catalogue: Peters 1989–II); (Exhibition catalogue: Peters 1989–III), no. 12, as Mother and Child.
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. 499 (catalogue G, no. 636), as Martha Twachtman and Daughter, Violet. (Hale concordance).
Hale 1989
Hale, John Douglass. "Twachtman in Greenwich: The Figures." In In the Sunlight: The Floral and Figurative Art of J. H. Twachtman, by Lisa N. Peters et al. New York: Spanierman Gallery, 1989. Exhibition catalogue, p. 41, as Mother and Child.
Peters 1989–III
Peters, Lisa N. "Catalogue." In In the Sunlight: The Floral and Figurative Art of J.H. Twachtman, by Lisa N. Peters et al. New York: Spanierman Gallery, 1989. Exhibition catalogue (1989 Spanierman), pp. 41, 78–79 ill. in color, as Mother and Child.
Peters 2021–II
Peters, Lisa N. Life and Art: The Greenwich Paintings of John Henry Twachtman. Cos Cob, Conn.: Greenwich Historical Society, 2021. Exhibition catalogue (2022 Greenwich Historical Society), pp. 62 ill. in color (fig. 46), 63, 65, as Mother and Child.
Commentary

In this painting, Twachtman depicted his wife and daughter Violet (born May 23, 1895), seen against the wall of the “outdoor dining room,” the large veranda on the south facade of their home in Greenwich. Evoking medieval and Renaissance icons, he treated the figures as flattened forms close to the picture plane, giving the work a spiritual aspect. With prismatic tints, he captured effects of sunlight and shadow on their white dresses as well as on surfaces of the wall below the veranda, the far-left dormer, and the temple-front portico that served as the formal entryway to the front of the home—its form softened by foliage. This transforms a scene of everyday life into an idealized and universal representation of the purity and beauty of maternal love.

The fact that this double portrait was especially important to Twachtman is clear from the place where it hung in his home: in a niche created by the addition he made to the living room in the mid-1890s, where the wall’s molding served as its frame and sunlight from the windows cast a glow over it. Its placement can be seen in a photograph (fig. 1).

Selected Literature

From Hale 1989

Among Twachtman’s figure paintings—more aptly called landscapes-with-figures—there are exceptions. One of these is Mother and Child (pl. 12), which comes closer to being a portrait in the conventional sense. The depictions of Martha and Violet are clearly rendered and Twachtman may have sought to invest the portrait with personal feeling, conveying the angelic qualities of his third daughter, born in the same year in which her older sister Elsie died. Yet, his interest in composing the figure in the landscape is still apparent as the triangular arrangement of the figures is balanced by the receding triangle created by the house, shown foreshortened behind the figures.