John Henry Twachtman Catalogue Raisonné
An online catalogue by Lisa N. Peters, Ph.D., in collaboration with the Greenwich Historical Society
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Keywords
WC.601
Boats on the Maas
Alternate title: Dutch Boats
ca. 1881
Watercolor on paper
12 x 18 in. (30.5 x 45.7 cm)
Signed lower left: J. H. Twachtmann
Private collection
Provenance
Marjorie Twachtman Pell, the artist's daughter;
by descent in the family to present collection.
Exhibitions
1888 American Water Color Society
National Academy of Design, New York, Twenty-First Annual Exhibition, American Water Color Society and the New York Etching Club, January 30–February 25, 1888, no. 545, as Boats on the Maas.
Literature
New-York Tribune 1888–I
"New-York Etchers: An Arts Decline and Fall." New-York Tribune, February 12, 1888, p. 16, as Boats on the Maas.
Van Rensselaer 1888–I
Van Rensselaer, Mrs. Schuyler [Mariana]. "Fine Arts: The Academy Water-Color Landscapes and Etchings." Independent 40 (February 16, 1888), p. 7, as Boats on the Maas.
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, p. 147; vol. 2, p. 672 ill. in b/w (fig. 129), as Dutch Boats.
Commentary

Depicting the Oude Maas River near Dordrecht, this work may have been used by Twachtman as the basis for his large etching, Boats on the Maas (E.652), which depicts the scene in reverse. In both the watercolor and etching, he featured shipping forms coalescing with windmills on the far shore. In the far left distance is a church that can also be seen in the etching (in the far right) as well as in Harbor Scene, Dordrecht (WC.602), demonstrating Twachtman's practice of using particular motifs to establish relationships within a group of works. (The church has yet to be identified.)

When this work was included in the 1888 exhibition of the American Water Color Society, in a joint show with the New York Etching Club, Marianna Van Rensselaer commented in the Independent on Twachtman’s "delicately imagined and rendered river-views in Holland," which she felt were "perhaps, the most remarkable of their especial kind." Twachtman's etching of the subject was also in the exhibition.