Catalogue Entry
While spending the summer of 1884 in the Normandy town of Arques-la-Bataille, Twachtman depicted views of the river valleys in the town's outskirts. This painting is among such images. However, the waterway featured here, which spans the work’s width, seems too wide to be one of the three narrow rivers that wind through the valleys or their confluence in the equally narrow Arques River, which joins the English Channel in Dieppe. That the scene features a pond or lake rather than a river is dispelled by a lack of evidence that such other types of waterways existed in the valleys of the region in the nineteenth century.[1] One possibility, that the work depicts a river that had flooded, spilling out across the land, is more likely.[2] In fact, there is a suggestion here that the waterway may consist partly of a marsh and areas of shallow water with silt lying across their surfaces. Yet another explanation for the apparent width of the waterway is that Twachtman’s viewpoint was on a low angle, making the narrow river seem wider than it was in actuality; as a slanted shape, it acquired new reflective properties, mirroring the valley, hills, and sky. Perhaps Twachtman depicted the scene from the same spot as in The River (OP.720), but stood at the edge of the riverbank here, where a cluster of weeds are present in The River. If so, the site is along the Arques River, which can be identified as that featured in The River (in the hills, the castle’s ruins above the town and the church within it can be seen). However, here Twachtman's perspective would have been southeast, away from the town. Such a viewpoint also explains the enlarged scale of the near embankment, set flush against the picture plane in the foreground, as Twachtman was probably sitting just below it to establish his perspective. The image may depict a bend in the river, so that the cropping of the scene at the right effectively cuts off our view of the opposing bank, while the river flows onward at the left.
The gestural brush handling, especially in the foreground, along with the work's flattened perspective, close cropping, and specificity suggest that Twachtman rendered the scene directly. A sense of immediacy is also demonstrated in his acute observations of the wispy clouds rising up from an adjacent valley and their reflections in the near water, the smoothness of hills stripped of foliage due to agriculture that thus reveal elevation changes, the decoratively spaced dark stands of trees, protected to shelter animals and facilitate reseeding, and the isolated tall trees left standing due to their longevity. The totality of the image at first masks the environmental complexity that Twachtman recorded.
It is likely that Twachtman felt that this painting represented his artistic identity well and thus chose it as the basis for the larger canvas that bears the same title (OP.731) that he submitted to the 1885 Paris Salon (see fig. 1). The larger Arques-la-Bataille is dated 1885 and inscribed Paris, indicating that Twachtman produced it in his Paris studio in the winter of 1885.
This painting was first described as a study for the larger painting in 1924.[3] However, Twachtman's signature on it indicates that he felt it was a complete work in its own right, and it was perhaps one he exhibited. However, no evidence of its inclusion in a lifetime exhibition has come to light. Its first confirmed exhibition was in 1919, when it was in a show of works from his estate at Macbeth Gallery. There, slightly mistitled, Arques de Bataille, the painting was purchased by a gallery in Kansas City, which then sold it to a local private collection. The work's location was unknown from about 1957, a time that Hale catalogued it, until 1990, a year before it was purchased by the Metropolitan.
[1] Maps include the Carte d’état Major, ca. 1820–66 (French Ordinance Survey May created by the French Army), https://www.geoportail.gouv.fr/donnees/carte de letat major-1820-1866.
[2] I would like to thank Richard Seager, Ph.D., Palisades Geophysical Institute/Lamont Research Professor, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, for consulting on the painting's site and ecological aspects. In Seager's opinion, the low level of the water spreading across the valley is suggestive of flooding. According to Philippe Gautrot, founder and director of the Académie Bach, Arques-la-Bataille, flooding does not usually occur in Arques-la-Bataille in the summer of fall, when Twachtman visited the town. Nonetheless, as pointed out by Seager, the Old World Drought Atlas indicates that the climate became wetter in northern France in the late nineteenth century, after more than a century of dryer conditions. This could have thrown the streams and rivers of the Arques Valley into disequilibrium. For analysis of the Old World Drought Atlas (OWDA), 1883–85, see Edward R. Cook et al, “Old World Megadroughts and Pluvials During the Common Era,” Science Advances 1 (November 6, 2015): https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/1/10/e1500533.full.pdf, and Serena R. Scholz, Richard Seager, Mingfang Ting, et al, "Changing Hydroclimate Dynamics and the 19th to 20th Century Wetting Trend in the English Channel Region of Northwest Europe," Climate Dynamics (September 2021), https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-021-05977-5, accessed October 4, 2021.
[3] Clark 1924, p. 38.
From Hale 1957
[Hale mistakenly felt this painting was Twachtman's final version of the scene.] Then with his virtuosity under control, Twachtman began to use it again, but discreetly. Illustrating this return of confidence is the Jones Arques-la-Bataille [OP.730]. If one compares it with the Clark Arques-la-Bataille [OP.731] he will see that, while both oils are typical of this period, in handling and subject matter, with their large expanses of calm water and delicately handled reeds and grasses, the Jones painting appears to indicate a lighter mood on the part of the artist. Here we see a foreground of herbage and flowers painted with a carefree impasto superficially reminiscent of Munich. Perhaps it was executed later in the season, which would account for the flowers, but no seasonal change would explain how the silhouette of the background became a joyful curve in the Jones picture when it was shown as an almost straight horizontality in the Clark. Surely these changes bespeak an increased confidence, indicating that the Jones oil is later in more ways than chronologically and that the rhythmic lines and scarcely restrained brush bravado are indicative of renewed assurance.
- Museum website (metmuseum.org)