Catalogue Entry
Twachtman's vantage point in this panoramic view is from Banner Hill in East Gloucester, looking over houses in the hills to the wharves, warehouses, and derricks along the shore. Beyond is Smith's Cove and the Inner Harbor, with the city of Gloucester on the horizon. At the left edge of the architectural structures along the water is the wide gable of the J. F. Wonson Fish Building on Wonson's Wharf (fig. 1). To its right the long pier extending over the water led to a boat dock, which served as a ferry landing. In fact, a swatch of white paint represents a vessel, probably the ferry, which can be seen approaching it. The diagonal line of the pier is continued in a dock in the upper right. It is probably Benjamin Parsons’s wharf in East Gloucester. On the horizon are the twin shapes of the city hall clocktower and the spire of the First Baptist Church.
This painting was not featured in the twenty-four charcoal sketches that Twachtman sent to his son Alden in 1900, created after works he rendered in Gloucester that summer. (Alden was in Bemis, Maine from July through September 1900, while convalescing from an illness.) Nonetheless, the work was a result of that summer: it was included, with the title of The Ferry Landing in Twachtman's four 1901 exhibitions, in Chicago; Columbus, Ohio; New York; and Cincinnati. The painting received much attention from the press. As indicated in the comments quoted in Selected literature, critics commended Twachtman for bringing together so many of the facets of Gloucester that compelled the town's artists while selecting his vantage point and compositional means for a unified design. Using a square format, he organized the scene's disparate elements through the use of intersecting diagonals, resulting in a patterned surface effect that critics related to Japanese prints. His use of light harmonious colors and a selective handling of detail was associated with the work of Whistler.
Twachtman's aesthetic considerations are apparent in a contrast with other artist's views from Banner Hill, such as Childe Hassam’s busier and more detailed Gloucester Harbor, 1899 (Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida) and Willard Metcalf's similarly tonal but crisper and less cohesive Gloucester Harbor, 1895 (Art Museum at Amherst College, Massachusetts.
Gloucester Harbor could have been sold during Twachtman's lifetime because it was not included in his 1903 estate sale. It may have been purchased from the artist by its first-known owner, Louise Emory Croly (1866–1945), who was married to Herbert David Croly, a leading figure in the early twentieth-century progressive movement and a co-founder of the New Republic. Later the painting belonged to the noted New York art collector, J. K. Newman.
From Chicago Times Herald 1901
The Ferry Landing should be noted as one of the most delightful in the group. It is full of vigorous painting, exquisite color and atmosphere, capital tendering of the twinship of water and boats. It is a scene that Whistler might have etched—yes painted. In the foreground are houses, plumelike trees bending their head before the gentle breeze, a skeletonlike trestle jutting out into the inlet from the sea forming the landing, while the distant shore shows a village on the hill, church spires placed against the blue sky.
From Chicago Post 1901
The Ferry Landing, seen from above, is Japanese and charming in arrangement. We see the roofs of the houses and slender landing stages running out into the water like centipedes, on their many piles. It has the same pleasant pearly color.
From Pattison 1901
In No. 19, “The Ferry Landing,” the artist stood up on a hill that we all know in East Gloucester and looked across the harbor to the city beyond. The near-by houses stand well up in the air next us and over beyond and below them the stretch of picturesque wharves lie flat and in excellent atmosphere. This is another example of managing the daubs of paint with exactness and superb nerve. The way the brush strokes, that seem to mean nothing, come to mean so much at forty feet off—please don’t get angry, friend; it is all there, and very true and impressive, and it “carries” perfectly.
From New-York Commercial Advertiser 1901–I
“Ferry Landing,” presumably of Gloucester, Mass. is thoroughly entertaining in arrangement and execution, and there are innumerable sketches of sea, river, wharves, shipping and landscapes that excite enthusiastic admiration at the skill, craftsmanship and good color taste.
From Weinberg, Bolger, and Curry 1994
Here Twachtman subsumes details of the working life of Gloucester—derricks along the edge of the water, a ferry approaching the long slip—into a subtle, pastel-colored, high-key atmosphere. Strong Japanese-inspired diagonals accord with a delicate Whistlerian calligraphy. Man-made elements such as the long pier that bisects the space and surface seem as lacy and fragile as the slender tree trunks on the foreground plane and other natural forms. Only the most evanescent creatures could populate this space; rugged fishermen or shipbuilders—or even boys at play, if they were depicted with Homer’s literalism—would seem bizarre inhabitants in this Gloucester [p. 127].
- Museum website (arkellmuseum.org)