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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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Keywords
OP.318
Winter Landscape
Alternate title: Japanese Winter Landscape
1879
Oil on canvas
12 3/4 x 20 1/8 in. (32.4 x 51.1 cm)
Signed, dated, and inscribed lower left: J. H. Twachtman / New York / 79
Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Alex Simpson Jr., Collection (1946-5-3)
Provenance
Ichabod Thomas Williams, New York;
to (American Art Association, New York, Williams sale, February 3–4, 1915, lot 22);
to A. H. Cosden;
(American Art Galleries, New York, April 4–5, 1918, lot 127);
to J. J. Everson;
Alex Simpson, Jr.;
bequest to present collection, 1946.
Exhibitions
1879 National Academy of Design probably
National Academy of Design, New York, Fifty-Fourth Annual Exhibition, April 1–May 31, 1879, no. 42, as Winter Landscape.
Literature
American Art Association 1915
The Notable Collection Formed by the Late Ichabod T. Williams, Esq. of New York. Auction catalogue, February 3–4, 1915. New York: American Art Association, 1915, lot 22 ill. in b/w, as Winter Landscape.
American Art Galleries 1918
An Important Collection of Valuable Modern Paintings. Auction catalogue, April 4–5, 1918. New York: American Art Galleries, lot 127, as Winter Landscape.
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. 742), as Winter Landscape. (Hale concordance).
Philadelphia Museum of Art 1965
Philadelphia Museum of Art. Checklist of Paintings in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Philadelphia. Philadelphia Museum of Art: 1965, as Winter Landscape.
Pyne 1989
Pyne, Kathleen A. "John Twachtman and the Therapeutic Landscape." In John Twachtman: Connecticut Landscapes, by Deborah Chotner, Lisa N. Peters, and Kathleen A. Pyne. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1989. Exhibition catalogue (1989–II National Gallery of Art), p. 51, as Japanese Winter Landscape.
Peters 1989–I
Peters, Lisa N. "Twachtman's Greenwich Paintings: Context and Chronology." In John Twachtman: Connecticut Landscapes, by Deborah Chotner, Lisa N. Peters, and Kathleen A. Pyne. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1989. Exhibition catalogue (1989–II National Gallery of Art), p. 51, as Japanese Winter Landscape.
Hiesinger 1991
Hiesinger, Ulrich. Impressionism in America: The Ten American Painters. Munich: Prestel, 1991, p. 74 ill., as Japanese Winter Landscape.
Spencer 2000
Spencer, Harold. "J. Alden Weir and the Image of the American Farm." In A Connecticut Place: Weir Farm—An American Painter's Rural Retreat, by Nicholai Cikovsky, Jr, et al. Wilton, Conn.: Weir Farm Trust in collaboration with the National Park Service, Weir Farm National Historic Site, 2000. Exhibition catalogue (2000 Weir Farm Trust), p. 58, as Japanese Winter Landscape.
Lyman 2004
Lyman, Laurel. "The Influence of Japonisme on the American Impressionists." Ph.D. dissertation, Graduate School of the City University of New York, 2004. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microforms, 2004, p. 102 (Fig. 72a), as Japanese Winter Landscape.
Commentary

Although Twachtman inscribed and dated several paintings “N.Y. 1879,” this is the only work known that he inscribed “New York.” Nonetheless, the snow-covered flat landscape, with a few huts and a coastline in the distance, has no urban aspect. Its closest parallel in subject matter is the etching, Snow Landscape (E.504), which is presumably a view of the countryside near Cincinnati. Through an overhead vantage point, Twachtman accentuated the isolation of the figure in a red skirt for whom shelter is in sight, at the end of the path on which she travels, yet still distant. The painting exemplifies a theme in his art of how loneliness is the result of being aware of but at a distance from human contact.  

That Twachtman signed, dated, and inscribed this painting suggests that it was the work he showed as Winter Landscape in the National Academy of Design annual of April–May 1879.[1] The first individual known to have owned the work was Ichabod T. Williams (1826–1899), the proprietor of the nation's largest manufacturer and distributor of domestic and foreign hard woods. The work was listed as Winter Landscape in Williams's estate sale in 1915. It retained this title in sales at the American Art Association, in 1915 and 1918. However, in the 1960s, the painting became known as Japanese Winter Landscape, probably because of its relationship to snow-covered scenes featuring isolated figures, silhouetted trees, and tiny huts in Japanese prints, such as Hiroshige's Evening Snow at Kanbara, from the series "Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō" 1787–1861 or Hokusai's Seaside Village in Winter, 1814. 

[1] No reviews of the exhibition mentioned the work shown. 

Selected Literature

From American Art Association 1915 

Snow lies deep over fields, meadows, dunes, at the borders of a salt-water bay. The soft gray-white covering has in large part a rolling surface of small hollows and low mounds, following the contour of the uneven land, a broad stretch in the foreground somewhat sheltered exhibiting smooth spread, unbroken save for a patch of brown weed and a short scraggly tree, to whose branches cling a few brown-red leaves. Near it a solitary figure in red and blue is making slow way, plodding through the snow toward a group of buildings in a clump of trees on higher land ahead. At different places in the meadows the tops of rail fences and haystacks appear, and in the distance at the shore line or in inlets the masts of sailboats. The sky, cold and foreboding, is filled with clouds.