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The Cabbage Patch depicts a view across the artist’s garden to the north facade of his Greenwich home. Throughout the work, Twachtman used an active brush, mixing his colors on the canvas, as if to record what was before him simply with the rhythmic movement of his hand and letting the scene emerge of its own accord. Instead of distinguishing his home from his garden, he blended the two together, integrating forms of flowers and a kitchen garden (probably including cabbage, even though the work’s title is not original) with the potted plants above the steps, the columns on the back porch, and the peak of a roof over the back door. As Susan G. Larkin has suggested, the “airy blue blossoms” that hover above the other plants could “be flax, a wildflower that blooms in summer along Connecticut roadsides,” while “asparagus lines the fence” in the background.[1]
The painting’s first known owner was Lewis P. Skidmore (1877–1955), a painter, restorer, educator, illustrator, who lived in New York and Connecticut. The work was inherited by Skidmore’s daughter Anne, who may have sold it to Chapellier Galleries. The work’s current title was in use by 1968 by the time it entered the collection of Dr. John J. McDonough, who purchased it from Chapellier.
[1] Larkin 1996, p. 228, note 2.
From Peters 1989
Twachtman achieves a sense of immediacy through both a panoramic composition and a varied paint application. Broad strokes of paint and large forms in the foreground progress to tighter brushwork and tiny details in the distance, such as the tiger lilies that hang in front of the house’s porch . . . The Cabbage Patch signals the shift in Twachtman’s work from a naturalistic depiction of the wilder aspects of the landscape to a pleasure in expressing nature as abstract pattern and design. (p. 62)
From Larkin 1996
Like Barnyard (OP.970), The Cabbage Patch (fig. 8.13) depicts an area that enabled Twachtman to supplement his income by growing his own food. (note 41) Garden-writers of Twachtman’s day were divided in their attitude toward vegetable plots. Peter Henderson devoted a chapter to the subject in his popular book, Gardening for Pleasure [note 42]. . . .
The American Impressionists shared Scott’s preference for ornamental gardens. During the 1870s and ’80s, American painters had occasionally depicted vegetable plots. Thomas Anshutz, for example, painted an African-American woman hoeing cabbages beside a modest cabin (fig. 8.14). This interest in kitchen gardens was widely shared by European painters working in the tradition of Millet [note 44]. By the 1890s, however, following the lead of the French Impressionists, progressive American artists concentrated on flower gardens. . . Twachtman’s Cabbage Patch, on the other hand, was as familiar as Saturday’s supper.
Though Twachtman’s painting depicts a variety of plants, his title names the humblest of them, the round heads of cabbage in the foreground. A dietary staple of the poor, cabbages were “cheap things” scorned by Scott. Henderson, who provided detailed horticultural instructions for other plants, dismissed cabbages as “so easily raised” that he need devote few sentences to their culture. . . .
Asparagus is usually planted on the garden’s perimeter, as in Twachtman’s painting, where it is out of the way of the cultivation and harvest of short-lived vegetables. Despite its modest title, Twachtman’s “cabbage patch” is not the plot of a cottager eking out his sustenance on rented land; rather, the asparagus signals that this is the garden of a discriminating homeowner.
The lush midsummer abundance of The Cabbage Patch communicates a sense of well-being. Like the equally utilitarian space depicted in barnyard, the vegetable garden combines the practical and ornamental. The airy blue blossoms hovering over the cabbages appear to be flax, a wildflower that blooms in summer along Connecticut roadsides. Rather than weeding it out, Twachtman has allowed it to flourish between his neat rows. The tiger lilies brightening the edge of the plot are common escapes from farmhouse gardens that naturalized widely in southern New England. Twachtman may simply have permitted them to grow with his vegetables. The urns in the background announce that even the most utilitarian spaces on his home ground are designed—and planted—with an eye for beauty [pp. 228–31].
From Schuyler 1997
John Twachtman’s Cabbage Patch . . . positions the vegetable garden as a kind of pastoral foreground to the flowers and the rear of dwelling in the distance. In much the way that nineteenth- and twentieth-century landscape architects screened the kitchen garden or working landscape from view, Impressionist representations of the garden created the image of a separate space devoted to leisure, a landscape as divorced from the realities of productive labor as the suburban community or rural village was from the downtown business district or tenement neighborhoods [p. 47].