Catalogue Entry
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Church at Arques was listed as number two in the catalogue for Twachtman’s first solo exhibition, held at J. Eastman Chase’s Gallery, Boston, in 1885. Its subject is the church of Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption in Arques-la-Bataille, situated at the center of the Normandy town, where Twachtman spent the summer of 1884. The church is in the form of a Latin cross. It was constructed initially in 1472, rebuilt in 1515, and augmented with a new quadrangular tower in 1633 (figs. 1–2). Its richly decorated exterior exemplifies the Flamboyant Gothic style, while its interior features a rare classical rood screen at the crossing.
Twachtman chose a view toward the south side of the building, but omitted the tower at the structure's east end. In the painting, he featured the wooden roof over the older half of the nave and the single buttress at its east side, constructed when the building started to lean (fig. 3). He portrayed the structure on a strong diagonal in the composition, along the side of the church that enclosed a cemetery (fig. 4) (no longer existing). Varying his tints carefully, he made a subtle distinction between the whites in the sky's haze and the warmer tone of the church stonework, accentuating its reflective glow and intricacy. On the opposite side of the street, receding buildings reveal the work's accurate perspective. (These are probably the same structures present today, see fig. 5). At the same time, Twachtman created a cross-axial design in which the diagonal of the low cemetery wall (from right to left) is intersected by the repeating pale reds (from left to right) of a near dormer, and two roofs of distant buildings. With a vertical tree, echoing the prominent church tower, he marked the vanishing point.
Church at Arques reveals Twachtman's skill at architectural rendering, honed during his studies in Paris. At the same time, the painting demonstrates his achievement of an understated yet balanced design, in which he used perspective decoratively. The painting was one in which he felt much pride. After showing it in his first solo show in Boston, he sent it on to the Inter-State Exposition in Chicago. In 1888, it was one of seven paintings he exhibited at the Society of American Artists annual.
The painting drew attention when it was on view at Chase’s Gallery in 1885. In a review of the exhibition, the Boston Daily Advertiser reviewer stated that it was more successful than the key work in the show, A French Garden (location unknown), which also included a view of the church: “Still more delightful is the smaller picture in which the same fine old church is seen from another point of view, so that the gracious lines of its buttresses and other florid features of the stone work of the apse come against the sky at the right of the composition. Any morsel, two inches square, cut from this canvas would reveal the artist by its quality.” A critic for the Boston Evening Transcript wrote: “No. 2 discloses such marvelous delicacy of color, such endless variety of almost imperceptible shades, such truth of air and distance, and more than all, of effect, optical as well as mental, that one feels at once that fundamentally the painter is quite right and sure.”
When the work was included in the annual of the Society of American Artists in 1888, Theodore Child (a noted American art critic and literary figure who lived in Paris for two decades) described it as a “careful little study of the exterior of the church at Arques.”[3] A writer for Nation commented: “Mr. Twachtman exhibits other landscape studies also, one of which in particular, “Church at Arques,” No. 124, is a charming bit of delicate color and is full of light and air.”