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End of Winter depicts a view looking north along Horseneck Brook from about the location of the Hemlock Pool. Two buildings visible in the left distance are probably the homes of Twachtman’s neighbors in Hangroot, as the area in Greenwich where he lived was known. The same structures can be seen in Spring Freshet (OP.1135) while the closer of the two buildings is depicted in Frozen Brook (OP.1001). Using both layering and a drybrush method, Twachtman brought out a range of subtle textural properties in the scene, while using delicate tonalities to express a time of seasonal transition.
This is probably the work exhibited with its current title in 1893 at the American Art Galleries exhibition. The painting was in Twachtman’s possession at the time of his death but was not included in his 1903 estate sale. It is possible that its first owner, William T. Evans, one of the sale’s organizers, purchased it before the sale. Evans owned the painting by 1904, when it was in an exhibition of his collection at his home in Montclair, New Jersey. The painting was on deposit at the Corcoran Gallery from 1907 to 1909, at a time when the Smithsonian did not have storage space. Perhaps Evans had already intended it as a museum gift by 1907; he donated it to its present collection in 1909.
From Henderson 1912
His “End of Winter” has qualities like Mr. Glover’s Inness, but is more poetic, more changeful in colour, more temperamental.
From Boyle 1979
Embodied in End of Winter is the positive feeling of expectancy lacking in Winter [OP.950]. There is a sense of life, an incipient movement. The clear air reveals the house in the background, which seems to be surveying the changing scene before it and at the same time gives the picture scale and distance. Quietly, along with its inhabitants, it waits for the onset of spring implied in the soft warm color and the gradual disappearance of snow from the surrounding landscape.
This is an entirely different treatment of the scene; technically, the dominant idea is realized by the use of deep space, as opposed to the frontality and shallow space of Winter. The implied shrinking action of the melting snow is accompanied by the strong diagonal of the stream that zigzags from the foreground to the road and house in the background, subtly pulling the eye back into the distance and from one side of the painting to the other. At the same time the trees create a varied pattern of forms over the canvas. This is a masterful picture painted by an artist whose control of his style enables him to express and to realize his ideas to their fullest, one who demonstrates an extraordinary response to the natural world in the same moment that he creates his own [p. 46].
From Peters 1995
In Greenwich, Twachtman not only designed his home and land in keeping with American suburban ideals as expounded in publications from the 1890s to the 1910s, he also expressed them in his images. In his Greenwich art, he depicted a countryside that was neither wild nor cultivated, but a zone in between, adhering to the English picturesque garden model in its American wild form that was praised by Mariana van Rensselaer and other native writers as an optimal sort of suburban terrain. This point of view is exemplified in Twachtman’s End of Winter (fig. 437). In this image of the brook zigzagging through the countryside, it is not possible to determine where human habitation begins and where nature on its own terms takes over: horizontal lines in hillside could be the natural lay of the land or cleared paths, colors of distant buildings are the same as those of the surrounding landscape, and architectural forms are aligned with the contours of the topography [pp. 406–7].
From Larkin 1996
In “End of Winter,” Twachtman faithfully portrayed the surrounding landscape as open farmland, with few trees even along Horseneck Brook. But he was not interested in depicting farm life, as Weir did in Branchville and Robinson did in Greenwich. Twachtman had seen in the plow-rutted acres what he would make of them [p. 218].
From Peters 1999-I
Twachtman’s End of Winter (pl. 48), a view of Horseneck Brook emerging from winter thaws and zigzagging through a countryside filled with the gentle tones of arriving spring, may be contrasted with Thomas Cole’s well-known The Oxbow (fig. 64 [Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York]) of 1836, a view of the curving route of the Connecticut River near Northampton, Massachusetts. In Cole’s painting, the landscape is divided into two sides, the wild side and the cultivated side, which is characterized by neatly divided fields. Given that these areas take up different sides of the canvas, we can choose only one on which to focus our gaze. By contrast, in Twachtman’s End of Winter (pl. 48), we are presented with the nature favored by turn-of-the-century authors who wrote of the American suburb, in which a landscape is neither too wild nor too cultivated and in which no clear line is drawn between man-made and natural aspects of the countryside. Twachtman accentuates this blurring of the distinction between the wild and the cultivated by introducing into the hillside horizontal lines that could represent the natural lay of the land or cleared paths, by painting distant buildings in the same colors as those of the surrounding landscape, and by showing architectural forms aligned with the contours of the topography. Since the light is muted, even, and diffused throughout the work, the entire site may be taken in at once, evoking a feeling of calm repose in the viewer. Indeed, by omitting a foreground plane, Twachtman entreats us to take part in the scene, experiencing it from the point of view of a landowner familiar with the landscape rather than as a visitor or tourist who might overlook the site’s subtle charms in search of more dramatic vantage points [p. 140].
- Museum website (americanart.si.edu)