Catalogue Entry
Gloucester is represented in one of the charcoal sketches that Twachtman sent to his son, Alden, to record the works he rendered in the Cape Ann town in the summer of 1900 (D.1418). At the top of the drawing, he wrote the work’s dimensions. His view here is from East Gloucester’s Banner Hill looking across the Inner Harbor to the city of Gloucester and beyond to the Outer Harbor.
As in Gloucester Harbor (OP.1403), and other works he created in Gloucester in the summer of 1900, Twachtman prominently featured the J. F. Wonson fish building; it is recognizable by the wide gable of its roof at the far left in the built forms along the shore. Here Twachtman’s vantage point was sharply downward, as he omitted the wharves lining the shore, which can be seen in images such as Gloucester Harbor, in order to focus in on buildings at the water’s edge, which appear to stand just below the lip of the hill. Painting the architectural structures with a heavy layer of dry white impasto, he turned the detached commercial buildings, used for fish processing, into what appears to be a resort in a U-shaped configuration nestled in a cove. He thus captured the way that the fishing town became a holiday destination in the summer at the turn of the twentieth century. An 1897 publication described this aspect of Gloucester as a “land of rackets and golf clubs, summer girls, novels, and hammocks, water-color kits, and white umbrellas.”[1]
At the right is a prominent tree, probably that featured in Wild Cherry Tree (OP.1405), its canopy of leaves obscuring the distance. Its presence exemplifies how Twachtman worked in series, using particular motifs to establish links across a group of images.
This painting does not appear to have been included in the artist’s 1901 solo exhibitions. The probable reason is that Twachtman withheld it in order to show it, with the title of Gloucester, in the exhibition of the Ten American Painters, held March 18–30, 1901 at Durand-Ruel Galleries in New York (which opened just after Twachtman’s solo exhibition in the same venue closed on March 16). One of three works in the Ten show, the painting received notice from reviewers that establish its presence there. The Art Interchange commented that the painting had “a lot of white in it.” Similarly, the New York Times reported that Twachtman's "view of Gloucester is smashed in with great sweeps of white paint." The New York Evening Post described the painting as “a large impression of ‘Gloucester,’ which proves on examination to be one-half absolutely bare canvas,” referring to the painting's lower register, where Twachtman left a significant amount of exposed ground. The New York Sun stated: “By J. H. Twachtman there is a canvas on which are some bread thin washes of white and blue by way of sky, water and buildings and some green and yellow patches and wriggles of the brush as a child might attempt to draw trees.”
The painting seems to have remained in the artist’s family until 1918, when it was sold through Silas S. Dustin—the agent for the Twachtman estate—to Young’s Gallery in Chicago. By 1923 it belonged to Paul Schulze, president of the Schultze Baking Company in Chicago. Schulze gave it in the following year to the Art Institute of Chicago as part of a memorial collection in honor of his father Walter Schulze. The museum deaccessioned the painting in 1986. In 1988 it was purchased by the Hartford Steam Boiler Company, and in 2001, it again became part of a museum collection again when it was given by the Steam Boiler Company to the Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, Connecticut.
[1] Edmund Garrett, Romance and Reality of the Puritan Coast (Boston: Little, Brown, 1897), p. 185.
From Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago 1925
[Gloucester has] that unity of mood, that invisibility of vision and expression which makes [Twachtman’s] work unique. High and cool in color, thinly but firmly painted, the separate elements—shore, houses, water, sky—are clearly indicated but woven into a whole that is the very essence of the scene.
- Museum website (collections.flogris.org)