Catalogue Entry
On their honeymoon in Dordrecht in the summer of 1881, John and Martha Twachtman were joined by the Weir brothers, Julian Alden and John Ferguson, in July, and this painting depicts the same site as in the latter's The Artist at Work, Alblasserdam, Holland (fig. 1). Twachtman's image is, therefore, also a view of Alblasserdam, a village located ten kilometers north of Dordrecht. In fact, the artist at work in Weir's image may, indeed, be Twachtman.
Holland is most likely the painting Twachtman exhibited as Near Alblasserdam in the Society of American Artists annual in April–May, 1882 and in the Inter-State Exposition, Chicago, in September–October, 1882. A label on the work's verso, in the artist's hand, indicates that it was also exhibited at the Portland Society of Art (Oregon) and then returned to him at 80 East Washington Square in New York.
This painting features a "post mill," a type of early European windmill, in which a roundhouse is raised on an upright vertical support. In the work, Twachtman emphasized the largeness of the mill, which towers above the landscape with its blades set off against the full extent of the sky. Its scale contrasts with a small community of homes that seem sunken into the earth, their roofs almost resting on the ground. Such an effect was captured as well by Vincent Van Gogh, who also spent time in Dordrecht in 1881. In Cottages, 1883 (fig. 2), Van Gogh featured similar dwellings to which he referred in a letter to his brother Theo as “human nests.” He stated: "I now really must go bird’s nesting with a number of variations of these ‘people’s nests’, which remind me so much of the nests of wrens — that’s to say, paint them."[1] The two artists were like-minded in their appreciation of the way that the Dutch people lived in such close contact with nature. Although it is unlikely perhaps Twachtman and Van Gogh crossed paths in the orbit of Mauve, Van Gogh's cousin-in-law and under whose guidance he created his first paintings, in oil and watercolor, in 1881.
[1] Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh,” Letter 411, in The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh, 3 volumes (New York: Bulfinch, 2000), vol. 2, p. 386.