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John Henry Twachtman Catalogue Raisonné
An online catalogue by Lisa N. Peters, Ph.D., in collaboration with the Greenwich Historical Society

Catalogue Entry

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Additional Images
Spring Study, Gloucester, ca. 1900 (OP.1414). OP.1414, Spring Study, Gloucester, detail with signature.
OP.1414, Spring Study, Gloucester, detail with signature.
Keywords
OP.1414
Spring Study, Gloucester
Alternate title: A Street
ca. 1900
Oil on canvas
9 x 5 in. (22.9 x 12.7 cm)
Signed lower left: J. H. Twachtman–
Private collection
Provenance
(American Art Galleries, New York, Twachtman estate sale, March 24, 1903, no. 15, as A Street, oil, 9 x 5 inches);
to Mrs. Bosworth;
(Macbeth);
Richard DeWolf Brixey, Broad Brook, Bedford Hills, New York;
to his wife Bertha DeWolf Brixey, New York, ca. 1943;
to their granddaughter, 1984;
to an art dealer, 2005;
to present collection, 2005.
Exhibitions
1903–I American Art Galleries
American Art Galleries, New York, Sale of the Work of the Late John H. Twachtman, exhibition and auction, March 19–24, 1903, no. 15, as A Street.
Literature
Sun 1903–II
"Twachtman Pictures, $16,610." Sun (New York), March 25, 1903, p. 5, as A Street.
Hale 1957
Hale, John Douglass. "Life and Creative Development of John H. Twachtman." 2 vols. Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 1957. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1958, vol. 2, p. 496 (catalogue G, no. 599), as A Street. (Hale concordance).
Commentary

The small-scale paintings of Gloucester that Twachtman exhibited at the Rockaway Hotel in August of 1900 were deemed “postage stamps” by a writer for the Gloucester Daily Times [1]. This painting may have been among them. It was not featured among the twenty-four charcoal sketches Twachtman created after paintings he rendered in Gloucester in the summer of 1900. However, it was is likely to have been created at that time. It was perhaps among the works to which a critic, reviewing Twachtman's 1901 exhibition in Chicago, called scenes "about East Gloucester," which conveyed "the impression of a chalk formation in the old seaport, or very white sand, very green vegetation and houses calcimed in delicate tints or grown pearly gray through stress of what appears to be singularly pure air.”[2]  

The painting was included in Twachtman's 1903 estate sale with the title A Street (9 x 5 inches), from which it sold for $50 to a “Mrs. Bosworth.”

[1] Gloucester Daily Times 1900. 

[2] Chicago Post 1901.