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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The Lagoon, Venice, ca. 1885 (P.712). Fig. 1. View of the Grand Canal Venice, from the Castello, looking west.
Fig. 1. View of the Grand Canal Venice, from the Castello, looking west.
The Lagoon, Venice, ca. 1885 (P.712). Fig. 2. Kanagawa, View over the Sea from the Teahouses on the Hill, no. 4 from the series “Famous Sights of the Fifty-three Stations,” 1855, color woodblock print. Art Institute of Chicago, Clarence Buckingham Collection (1925.3486).
Fig. 2. Kanagawa, View over the Sea from the Teahouses on the Hill, no. 4 from the series “Famous Sights of the Fifty-three Stations,” 1855, color woodblock print. Art Institute of Chicago, Clarence Buckingham Collection (1925.3486).
Keywords
P.712
The Lagoon, Venice
ca. 1885
Pastel on paper
13 1/4 x 15 3/4 in. (33.7 x 40 cm)
Signed lower left: J. H. Twachtman–
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (P11s34)
Exhibitions
1992 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lure of Italy: American Artists and the Italian Experience, 1760–1914, September 16–December 13, 1992, no. 122, pp. 418 ill. in color , 419, as The Lagoon, Venice, entry by Karen Haas. Traveled to: Cleveland Museum of Art, February 3–April 11, 1992; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, May 23–August 8, 1992.
2004 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, Gondola Days: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Palazzo Barbaro Circle, April 21–August 15, 2004. (McCauley 2004), as The Lagoon, Venice. Traveled to: Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice, Italy, October 8–December 7, 2004.
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. 593 (catalogue A, no. 1044), as The Lagoon, Venice. (Hale concordance).
Hendy 1974
Hendy, Philip. European and American Paintings in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1974, p. 266 ill. in b/w, as The Lagoon, Venice.
Haas 1992
Haas, Karen. "John Henry Twachtman: The Lagoon, Venice, 1885." In The Lure of Italy: American Artists and The Italian Experience, 1760–1914, by Theodore Stebbins Jr. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1992. Exhibition catalogue, pp. 418–19, 418 ill. in color, as The Lagoon, Venice.
Peters 1992
Peters, Lisa N. "John H. Twachtman: A 'Modern' in Venice, 1877-1878." In The Italian Presence in American Art, 1860–1920, ed. Irma B. Jaffe. New York: Fordham University Press, 1992, pp. 76–77 ill. in b/w, as The Lagoon, Venice.
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. 212; vol. 2, p. 741 ill. in b/w (fig. 210), as The Lagoon, Venice.
McCauley 2004
McCauley, Elizabeth Anne et al. Gondola Days: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Palazzo Barbaro Circle. Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2004. Exhibition catalogue (2004 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum), pp. 264–65, 276 ill. in color (fig. 215), as The Lagoon, Venice.
Butler 2019
Butler, Eliza. "John Henry Twachtman and the Materiality of Snow." American Art 33 (Fall 2019), p. 78 ill. in color (fig. 4), as The Lagoon, Venice.
Commentary

Twachtman used pastel for the first time in Holland during the summer of 1885. He continued to explore the medium in Venice, while residing from October through the end of the year with his friend Robert Blum at the Palazzo Contarini degli Scrigni in the San Trovaso Quarter on the Grand Canal, near where he had stayed in Dorsoduro in 1877–78.

Here his view is looking west from the Riva degli Schiavoni in Castello toward Santa Maria della Salute, seen in the left distance. His approximate perspective can be gauged in a photograph (fig 1). St, Mark’s campanile is in the far right. Two campanili, belonging to San Stefano and San Moisé, stand together in the middle distance. It is clear that Twachtman’s view was from a relatively high floor, from which he glimpsed a corner of his building or one next to it, and included it at the work’s right edge. In the upper right corner, a man gazes out of his own window toward the view. In fact, it is possible that Twachtman’s vantage point was from the Casa Jankowitz (now Hotel Bucintoro), where Otto Bacher was staying when Whistler joined him there in June 1880, gaining access to the printing press Bacher had installed in his room. Perhaps Twachtman sought out this locale, knowing it was where Whistler had worked.

Tilting his picture plane forward, in The Lagoon, Venice Twachtman created one of his most overtly upright compositions from this phase in his career, suggestive of the influence of Japanese prints, such Hiroshige’s View of the Ocean from the Teahouses on the Hill at Kanagawa (Station #4) (1855) from Pictures of Famous Places on the Fifty Three Stations (fig. 2). The arrangement also evokes Whistler’s Venetian pastels, looking over open stretches of water with buildings forming a picturesque fringe against the sky. However, Twachtman concentrated less on the surface effects explored by Whistler with pastel color, as in Venice: Sunset on a Harbour, 1880. Instead, he expressed his immediate perceptual experience. He conveyed the reflective light on the water from the hazy but cloudless sky with a thin layer of pale blue crayon, through which the warmth of the orange-tinted paper is visible. To each boat on the water, he paid careful attention. On an angle in the center foreground, he depicted a sandolo (a flat-bottomed vessel like a small gondola), its pointed nose visible on its prow while the form of its standing oarsman blends into the boat’s overall silhouette. Two lateen-rigged boats with sails painted orange form a diagonal alignment in the upper right. Twachtman used delicate orange-red shading for the sails, whose color is repeated in the two distant church towers. He noted the way the bright tip of one sail broke the horizon line, while another visually touched the base of the Salute. At the right, an anchored sailboat, seen from the stern, is tethered to a red-orange buoy. As he shows the full rectangle of the stern, Twachtman indicates that the boat, in shallow water, is light in cargo. Its bare masts echo the triangle of the basilica’s spire to its right. Just above the center of the composition, a second sandolo activates a continuous circular yet rhythmic movement throughout the arrangement, resulting in the ability for the viewer to take in the scene in its entirety.

It is possible that this pastel was shown as Twixt Night and Day (no. 57) in the May 1888 exhibition of the Society of Painters in Pastel.[1] Such an assumption is based on a review in the New York Herald: "Extremely picturesque is Mr. Twachtman's Venetian lagoon scene, with anchored vessels called 'Between Day and Night.'"[2] In the fall, Twachtman sent Twixt Night and Day to the Chicago Inter-State Exposition, where it was number 406 in the show.[3]  

The early provenance of The Lagoon, Venice is unknown; however, its first owner was presumably Isabella Stewart Gardner, who was no doubt drawn to it due to her love of Venice. The work may have been part of Gardner’s personal collection. At some point before her death in 1924, it was listed among the museum’s holdings. However, the museum does not have a record as to when it entered the collection.

[1] 1888 Wunderlich. There were several other Venetian pastels by Twachtman in the exhibition that could have been this work, including A Venetian Canal (no. 53), Old Venice (no. 54), and Grey Day in Venice (no. 59). 

[2] New York Herald 1888–III.

[3] 1888 Chicago Inter-State.