Catalogue Entry
Depicting his Greenwich home looking south from the "terrace," consisting of the hill above his family's barn, in From the Upper Terrace, Twachtman portrayed a self-contained world in which the central role of his home is the evident player. At the top of the hill, the dwelling is crowned by trees and seems the point from which all aspects of the scene emanate. Serpentine paths and the road lead to it, while the cultivated aspects of the land spread outward from it, blending gradually into nature to convey its harmony with its surroundings. The western corner of the barn is on the lower left, making it seem to look up toward the house in admiration. Peering toward the viewer is the dormer in the newer section of the house (at the right) that belonged to Twachtman's studio. It is as if we are being asked to share his pride in what he created.
Throughout From the Upper Terrace, Twachtman used the vigorous broken daubs characteristic of Impressionism, but he did not neglect the distinctive attributes of his home grounds, applying succinct brushwork to indicate the gable over the back entryway, the birdhouse at the work’s center, and the well house shielded by bushes at the side of the road at the left.
This was probably the painting shown as From the Terrace in the exhibition at the American Art Galleries in 1893 (featuring work by Twachtman, Julian Alden Weir, Claude Monet, and Paul-Albert Besnard). It can be definitively identified as the painting Twachtman included in 1898 at the first exhibition of the Ten American Painters, held at Durand-Ruel Galleries, New York, and the St. Botolph Club in Boston. He additionally featured it in his 1901 exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cincinnati Art Museum, where at both locations, it was shown with its current title. A reviewer for the Chicago Times Herald described it in 1901 as an image of "a quaint little house approached by a swirling path, a road leading up a distant hill, a winsome tangled patch of foliage, a garden perhaps in the foreground of the picture broadly painted in an original manner with considerable subtlety."
The painting remained in the artist’s estate until about 1918. In 1919 it was sold by Macbeth Gallery to the Art Institute of Chicago. The museum included the work in its two Centuries of Progress exhibitions, held 1933 (fig. 1) and 1934, and the work was shown at the retrospective of Twachtman’s work at the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1966. In 1986 the Art Institute sold the painting through Sotheby’s to Love Galleries of Chicago. It was purchased from Love by Richard Pfeil, who again sold the painting through Jordan-Volpe. The painting was sold at Christie’s in 2013.
From Britton 1919
[After discussion of Summer (OP.918)]: That other summer picture, “From the Upper Terrace”; what a delightful prospect it offers, and yet the material in the hands of a crass realist would have turned to gall! We can imagine Twachtman when painting this picture as having a playful little thought of Pissarro in his mind, for it was Pissarro’s sort of impressionism and not Monet’s, that offered the American what he wanted for precept.
From Cheney 1958
The artist is found openly experimenting with geometrical elements, playing the linear angles and sloping planes against convex and concave forms, with introduced linear and patterned-area variations. The recessive and forward values of colour too are utilized for movement potency, with an effect not evident in black-and-white reproduction.
From Connors 2021
The sense of [the artist's house] being at one with its setting is manfest in From the Upper Terrace (Fig. 1). Spun from the same palette as the garden and landscape around it, its saltbox form almost disappears into the diaphonous vista, sae for the dark green of the trees behind it that push the structure forward.