Catalogue Entry
For In the Sunlight, a painting Twachtman sent often to exhibitions, he posed his wife, Martha, in a chair on a patch of ground above the root cellar behind his Greenwich home, with blue reflections falling across her white dress. Her face, under a straw garden hat, is in shadow. Encircling her are phlox at the edge of the more overgrown hillside. When the work was exhibited in Cincinnati 1897, Eugene Hall called it an image of “a girl in a bower of bright green.”
The painting was first exhibited in the show of the work of Twachtman, Julian Alden Weir, Claude Monet, and Paul-Albert Besnard, which opened in May 1893 at the American Art Galleries. There it was paired with an indoor view of Martha, Figure in Sunlight (OP.961), exhibited as In the Doorway. In some exhibitions, this painting was titled In the Sunshine, including the 1932 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, to which it was lent by the artist's wife. The title is indicated on a label on the reverse side of the canvas that gives the artist's Round Hill Road address as its place of ownership.
Eliot Clark may well have had this painting in mind in his description in his 1924 monograph of Twachtman’s figural works: “Not portrait studies of physiognomical characterizations, the figure is seen as a whole and the painter finds his interest more in the attitude and suggested environment than in detailed delineation and likeness. He is interested particularly in the luminous envelopment of the figure and in the study of the local color, as modified by the dominant hue of the light.”[1]
The painting sold from the artist’s 1903 estate sale to John Gellatly. However, Gellatly seems to have returned the painting to the artist’s family. It was probably the work Martha Twachtman lent to a 1920 exhibition at Rehn Gallery, New York, that lacked a catalogue, but was reviewed in the New York Times. It remained in the family of the artist’s daughter Violet until 1987.
[1] Clark 1924, p. 54.
From Art Amateur 1898
Mr. Twachtman, whose “In the Sunshine” has been seen before, [has] taken up the so-called impressionistic methods not merely for the sake of novelty or because they desire to cover up indifferent drawing, but because they wish to secure certain qualities of light and atmosphere, and are more or less indifferent to other things.
From New York Commercial Advertiser 1901
"A Girl in Sunshine,” . . . looks like the first lay-in of a picture, the preliminary ebauche to be completed later on. Yet here it is presented as a finished work.
From New York Times 1921
Two of the pictures exhibited are figure subjects, one a woman seated in an open doorway, the other a woman out of doors. In each the figure is reduced to the simplest, generalization, yet richly expressive of form. The blossoms and leaves, faint and fluttering in the background, the white and blue of the draperies, the blond shadow and radiant light, all with a hint of robust health in their fair refinement make barely intolerable the aggressive robustness of brutal realism. To live with such paintings would so much refine the eye that violence in color and form would strike upon the retina as painfully as the music of trumpets and drums upon the ears used only to violins and flute. Of course, there are moods to which the most sensitive are subject, moods in which an aristocracy of sensation becomes oppressive and the good brown earth of Courbet a pagan pleasure.
From Hale 1989
In a simpler composition, for example, In the Sunlight, the single figure dominates the landscape for no other reason than the fact that it is the central form in the composition and the largest. Even the sunlit flat area is almost as important and enhances the whole rather than being there only to set off the portrait. In the related painting Figure in Sunlight [OP.961], the artist’s wife is again the dominant form. Even though seated on a shaded porch, her figure is given the same generalized treatment as the stone structure behind her and assumes the contours of an architectural form in the landscape. In comparison to paintings such as Eastman Johnson’s Hollyhocks (New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut) and other depictions of women in gardens by Frederick Carl Frieseke, Philip Leslie Hale, Childe Hassam, or Robert Reid, which associate the pleasures of a garden’s blooms and nature’s freshness with the female figure, Twachtman’s works treat the figure as a formal motif in the landscape. They are to a great extent devoid of the gentility that exudes from so many works by American artists of the period [pp. 40–41].
From Peters 1989
The image of a female figure engaged in quiet contemplation and associated with aesthetic experience was one explored by countless artists during the late nineteenth century. Twachtman, however, separates himself from the characteristic idealized and posed depictions of women painted by his contemporaries. His aim was to capture the unplanned moment and express his immediate reaction to a subject.