Catalogue Entry
This painting was listed as The House in Nodd, in the catalogue for the February 1889 exhibition and sale of the work of Twachtman and Julian Alden Weir, held at the Fifth Avenue Art Galleries. The New York Times reviewer was perhaps referring to it in the comment: “[t]hat sportive, joyous touch which Mr. Twachtman shows in pastels is even more apparent in some of his oils, which have the bright transparency of the chalks, much it would seem as it strikes his fancy.”[1] The work sold from the show for $90 according to the New York Sun. However, it appears to have been returned to the Twachtman family after the sale, as it subsequently belonged to the artist’s son Godfrey. Over time, its original title was forgotten.
The painting’s site is probably Nod Hill Road in Branchville. This was the location of Weir’s farm, and the area in general was called "The Land of Nod," after a place of wandering in Genesis. An article in the New York Times referred to the “Land of Nod” as the “quaint Biblical title of a place near Branchville, Conn., from which [Weir] has taken a landscape full of good composition and feeling for elevations and depressions in a rolling country.”[2] The work can be dated to the summer of 1888, when Twachtman rented a home for his family to be able to paint alongside his close friend. At the time, he depicted the same site in another oil, also on panel—Road to Ridgefield (OP.816)—as well as in a pastel ’Neath Summer Skies (P.801). Both works were also in the 1889 show and sale.
Here Twachtman's view appears to have been from behind the gate in the lower left corner of the work, from which he gazed on a diagonal to the farmhouse and barn. Perceiving the scene from a lower angle than in Road to Ridgefield and ’Neath Summer Skies, he cropped the near farmhouse so that only one gable end can be seen and he included the turn of the road and additional farm buildings over the brow of the hill that are not present in the other images.
[1] ] New York Times 1889-I.