Catalogue Entry
Middlebrook Farm was included with its current title in the 1889 sale of the work of Twachtman and Julian Alden Weir (see Exhibitions). The farm is still on Ridgefield Road in Wilton, Connecticut, four miles south of Weir’s former home in Branchville on Nod Hill Road (fig. 1). The records of the Wilton Historical Society indicate that the house—featured prominently in Twachtman’s image—was probably built in the early nineteenth century. At the time Twachtman painted the farm, its owner was Samuel Bradley Middlebrook, a member of an old Wilton family of successful farmers who had a home on the site since 1755.[1] Twachtman depicted the same farm and setting from a closer vantage point in Barn on the Hill (OP.818).
Many features that Twachtman included in the painting either remain or have been recorded as once present, including the barn situated behind the farmhouse (now a private home), the house’s wide chimney (now narrower, but evidence of a wider chimney has been recorded), and a house in the hills at the upper right (known to have once been present). In the early twentieth century, the home was extended and the shape of its chimney was narrowed. Whereas in Barn on the Hill Twachtman stood close enough to the farm to depict the stone wall beside it and other outbuildings, here his view is more detached, showing it as an isolated shape in the broader landscape.
When the painting was included in the February 1889 show and sale, a critic for Art Amateur described it as “a typical American landscape, raw, barren, and rocky, but delightful in its way as a page of description out of Hawthorne or Emerson.” [2]
[1] Information on Middlebrook Farm was courteously provided by the Wilton Historical Society, including a survey on the house from Historic Resources Inventory Building and Structures, State of Connecticut, Connecticut Historical Commission, compiled by Mary E. McCahon, architectural historian, April–May 1989, Wilton Historical Society, Connecticut. Another source on the house is Wilton Historical Society, Eighteenth Century Dwellings in Wilton (Wilton, Conn.: Wilton Historical Society House Files, 1976). For help in identifying this site, I would like to thank Scotty Taylor, Wilton Historical Society.