Catalogue Entry
The suburbs formed in Cincinnati's hills after the city's inclined railways were completed between 1872 and 1876 provided Twachtman with his subject matter in the early 1880s. This was the case especially after he returned to his hometown from his European honeymoon early in 1882, when he and his wife Martha lived in her family's home on Ridgeway Avenue in the suburb of Avondale. About a mile to the east was Bloody Run. Two explanations have been given for the name of the valley: one is that it was the site of a presumed massacre in pioneer days by Indians of a group of white settlers; another is that it contained a channel through which the blood from the city's pig slaughterhouses ran. The title was not used in the artist's lifetime exhibitions, but the muddy downward curve of the valley suggests the latter explanation. The road through the valley was called Bloody Run Boulevard until 1921 and it is now Cincinnati's Victory Parkway.
In Bloody Run, dated 1882, Twachtman portrayed an area seemingly in the process of turning into a suburb. His view is upward to the snow-covered hills where the dark forms of houses are perched precariously at the hillcrest. In the melted snow, he created a line of movement, carrying the viewer's eye up into the hills and across the horizon line.
It is likely that Bloody Run was the work Twachtman exhibited as Winter (no. 111) at the Society of American Artists Fifth Annual exhibition in 1882. This is suggested in an article in the Art Journal, in which a critic described this work as a depiction of “two hillside slopes with sparse wood, and snow-covered, [which] has all the bleakness of desolation . . . to be found in such localities."[1] Other critics commented on the high stamp of approval given to the painting by the show's jury, while praising Twachtman for making a seemingly unappealing subject into one of beauty. A critic for the New York World wrote that the painting was a “strong and original work” that “won more votes from the Committee on Admissions than did any other candidate whatever,” and went on to state: "Some deny that there is beauty in such work as this with all its cleverness; but beauty is of a thousand kinds and we have to thank Mr. Twachtman for thus developing it, as he surely does, from unpromising materials which no one had cared to touch before.”[2] In Lippincott's, Mariana van Rensselaer noted that Twachtman's "winter scene, showing the outskirts of an American town, was perhaps the most striking of his contributions, and his brother artists proved their estimate of its claims by giving it more votes than fell to the lot of any other picture offered."[3]
[2] New York World 1882.
[3] Van Rensselaer 1882.
From Hale 1957
While the Munich paintings were dark they were naturally not colorless. But the hues Twachtman used were so grayed that contemporary laymen might have been as confused as the present owner of Bloody Run . . . who thought “Twachtman liked to paint dirty snow.” The low key of this typical oil is deceptive. The only colors used are the grayed blue-green of the sky, the subdued green of the foliage, and an earth red that is little more than a / 184 / brown, although the artist's use of it makes it seem more intense. The shadows and delicate variations in the colors in the snow are so somber as to give the appearance of sooty areas to the uninitiated eye [pp. 181, 185].
- Museum website (cincinnatiartmuseum.org)