loading loading
John Henry Twachtman Catalogue Raisonné
An online catalogue by Lisa N. Peters, Ph.D., in collaboration with the Greenwich Historical Society

Catalogue Entry

enlarge
Related Work
loading
Keywords
OP.1138
The Waterfall
Late 1890s
Oil on canvas
30 x 30 1/8 in. (76.2 x 76.5 cm)
Signed lower right: J. H. Twachtman
Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, Museum Purchase (1907.91)
Provenance
(Copley Gallery, Boston);
to present collection, 1907.
Exhibitions
1908 Worcester Art Museum
Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, Eleventh Annual Summer Exhibition, Summer 1908, no. 39, as The Waterfall.
1909 Worcester Art Museum
Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, Twelfth Annual Summer Exhibition, opened May 28, 1909, no. 23, as The Waterfall.
1966 Cincinnati Art Museum
Cincinnati Art Museum, John Henry Twachtman: A Retrospective Exhibition, October 7–November 20, 1966. (Exhibition catalogue: Baskett 1966); (Exhibition catalogue: Boyle 1966–I), no. 55, as The Waterfall.
1980 Hurlbutt Gallery
William Benton Museum, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut and American Impressionism, March 20–May 31, 1980, no. 69, p. 77 ill. in b/w, as The Waterfall.
1999 High Museum of Art
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, John Henry Twachtman: An American Impressionist, February 26–May 21, 2000. (Peters 1999–I), no. 20, pp. 93, 95 ill. in color, as The Waterfall. Traveled to: Cincinnati Art Museum, June 6–September 5, 1999; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, October 16, 1999–January 2, 2000.
2003 Worcester Museum
Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, Paths to Impressionism: French and American Landscape Painting, October 4, 2003–June 27, 2004. (Johns 2003), as The Waterfall. Traveled to: Allentown Art Museum, Pennsylvania, October 31, 2004–February 13, 2005; Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, Tennessee, February 23, 2005–June 11, 2006.
Literature
American Art News 1907
"Worcester Gets a Twachtman." American Art News 6 (November 9, 1907), p. 1, as The Waterfall.
Boston Transcript 1907
"In the Galleries." Boston Transcript, October 16, 1907, as The Waterfall.
Worcester Art Museum 1908
Twelfth Annual Report of the Worcester Art Museum. Worcester, Mass.: Worcester Art Museum, 1908, p. 11, as The Waterfall.
Worcester Art Museum Bulletin 1916
"Worcester Art Museum." Bulletin 7 (October 1916), pp. 3, 14 ill. in b/w, as The Waterfall.
Worcester Art Museum Bulletin 1917
"Worcester Art Museum." Bulletin 8 (October 1917), p. 50, as The Waterfall.
Clark 1921
Clark, Eliot. "The Art of John Twachtman." International Studio 72 (January 1921), p. lxxxii ill. in b/w, as The Waterfall.
Worcester Art Museum 1922
Catalogue of Paintings and Drawings. Worcester, Mass.: Worcester Art Museum, 1922, pp. 148 ill. in b/w, 149, 208, as The Waterfall.
Hale 1957
Hale, John Douglass. "Life and Creative Development of John H. Twachtman." 2 vols. Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 1957. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1958, vol. 2, p. 576 (catalogue A, no. 681), as The Waterfall. (Hale concordance).
Boyle 1974–I
Boyle, Richard. American Impressionism. Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1974, pp. 168, ill. in b/w, 170, as The Waterfall.
Boyle 1979
Boyle, Richard. John Twachtman. New York: Watson-Guptill, 1979, pp. 66–67 ill. in color, as The Waterfall.
Hiesinger 1991
Hiesinger, Ulrich. Impressionism in America: The Ten American Painters. Munich: Prestel, 1991, p. 15 ill. in color, as The Waterfall.
Peters 1995
Peters, Lisa N. "John Twachtman (1853–1902) and the American Scene in the Late Nineteenth Century: The Frontier within the Terrain of the Familiar." 2 vols. Ph.D. dissertation, City University of New York, 1995. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International, 1996, vol. 1, pp. 381, 497; vol. 2, p. 929 ill. in b/w (fig. 415), as The Waterfall.
Larkin 1996
Larkin, Susan G. "'A Regular Rendezvous for Impressionists:' The Cos Cob Art Colony 1882–1920." Ph.D. dissertation, 1996. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microforms, 1996, pp. xxix, 238, 475 ill. in b/w (8.32), as The Waterfall.
Brigham 1997–I
Brigham, David. "American Impressionism." American Art Review 9 (September–October 1997), pp. 166–68 ill. in color, as The Waterfall.
Brigham 1997–II
Brigham, David R. American Impressionism: Paintings of Promise. Worcester: Worcester Art Museum, 1997. Exhibition catalogue, pp. 11, 19–20, 83 ill. in color, as The Waterfall.
Larkin 1998
Larkin, Susan G. "On Home Ground: John Twachtman and the Familiar Landscape." American Art Journal 29 (1998), pp. 82 ill. in b/w, 83, as The Waterfall.
Peters 1999–I
Peters, Lisa N. John Henry Twachtman: An American Impressionist. Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 1999. Exhibition catalogue (1999 High Museum of Art), pp. 93, 95 ill. in color, as The Waterfall.
Johns 2003
Paths to Impressionism: French and American Landscape Paintings from the Worcester Museum. Johns, Elizabeth. Worcester, Mass.: Worcester Art Museum, 2003. Exhibition catalogue (2003 Worcester Museum), pp. 76–78, 83 ill. in color, 102 ill. in color, as The Waterfall.
Commentary

This is one of the four paintings, along with Waterfall: Blue Brook (OP.1137),The Cascade (OP.1139), and Falls in January (OP.1140), in which Twachtman featured Horseneck Falls from an oblique view in a closely cropped arrangement, emphasizing the subject more as a matter of the viewer's perceptual experience of color, light, and form than of the waterfall itself. In each image, he depicted the scene at a different time of day and in varying light conditions. Here the light seems that of a soft, diffused sunlight at midday, heightening the glare on the upper downward drop of the cascade and the gentler glow as it flows over the rocks below and blends softly into the continuing brook.

The Waterfall was probably in the Twachtman estate until about 1907, when it was shown at the Copley Gallery in Boston. In a review of the show, the Boston Transcript reported that the work was a “freely and boldly brushed picture of a waterfall, an exceedingly difficult subject, handled with remarkable mastery and suggestiveness. The color, in which various blues, blue-greens, and grays predominate in the delineation of the moving water, is admirably clear, brilliant, resonant; and the rush and tumult of the cascade as it comes foaming and plunging down over the ledges in its path, is marvelously rendered, without apparent labor or hesitation. The execution is loose, free, and summary, with no waste of effort, but it goes straight to the mark.”

The painting was sold that year by Frank W. Bayley of Copley Gallery in Boston to the Worcester Art Museum. Bayley wrote to Daniel Merriman, cofounder (with his wife Helen Bigelow Merriman) and first president of the Worcester Art Museum, several times about the painting in September and October 1907. To promote it, he showed it to a number of artists, including Joseph DeCamp, Theodore Wendell, Willard Metcalf, William Paxton, John Enneking, and Philip Leslie Hale, and noted that these artists had confirmed his belief “that it is one of the best examples of [Twachtman's] work.”[1]

[1] F. W. Bayley, October 14, 1907, to Daniel Merriman, Curatorial Files, Worcester Art Museum. 

Selected Literature

From Johns 2003

In The Waterfall, the viewer looks into a highly compressed interpretation of the high falls from nearby, almost as though standing in one of the secluded nooks that Twachtman had devised for contemplation. In thick impasto with rich colors of pink, light and more saturated blues, purple, browns, and two different dazzling whites, Twachtman conveyed the force of the water. At the top of the falls, white reflects sunlight coming from the right, a dazzling turquoise blue conveys the rush of the water downward, and at the bottom of the falls, light blue and white give the swirling of the cascade after its plungs. Twachtman placed a high horizon in the upper left distance, where shrubs preserve the natural look of the property. Painted with a generous brush on a large-weave, probably sisal, canvas that is exposed in many areas, the picture has a square format, a shape that several landscape artists were using at the time, which emphasizes a landscape’s aesthetic rather than reportorial function. Although the picture is not as disorienting on first sight as Monet’s Les Nymphéas, Paysage d’eau / Water Lilies, Water Landscape, we have to put the scene together by absorbing the message of brushstrokes and pure color.