Catalogue Entry
This painting was probably shown as A Country Road in the artist’s 1885 solo exhibition at Chase’s Gallery, Boston (no. 13). The scene depicts the environs of Arques-la-Bataille, France, where Twachtman spent the summer of 1884 with his family, but instead of a view looking toward the hills—as in the two paintings belonging to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, both titled Arques-la-Bataille (OP.730 and OP.731)—here Twachtman’s perspective was high in the hills themselves, looking along a winding road toward one of the groves of trees that can be seen on the hillcrest in his more distant views. Such groves were intended to shelter animals and to facilitate reseeding, and they stood out against land otherwise stripped of foliage by agriculture. Here the autumnal foliage on a few trees indicate that the artist's visit to the town stretched into the fall.
No mention of the work specifically was made by the critics reviewing the exhibition at Chase’s Gallery, but a writer for the Boston Daily Advertiser could have had it in mind in the statement:
Mr. Twachtman, whose work has always been interesting, has taken of late a new departure and now paints in a very pale gray key, which at first gives an impression of monotonous tones without great depth, such as a superficial pastich [sic] of Corot might produce; but it is only just to hasten to add that this is not by any means the memory that one takes away from the gallery. For as one looks into the pictures, a beautiful harmony of colors, as subtle and moving as a strain of fine music, chorus and delights the sensitive observer. It is useless to attempt to analyze this delicate quality, for it is as indescribable as the perfume of a flower; and one must feel the pictures it conveys in order to understand it.[1]
[1] Boston Daily Advertiser 1885.
From 1919 Macbeth Gallery
Soft gray and green. Path wide at foreground, narrowing as winds inward toward group of trees, their few leaves turned autumnal brown. Field slopes upward to right. To left green meadow narrows as it extends backward between wooded knolls until merging with distant horizon. Sky light gray fleecy soft.