Catalogue Entry
As noted by Mary Baskett, this etching was possibly Snow Landscape, included in the 1883 annual of the New York Etching Club. A review of the show in the New York Sun commented on the work:
The only things in the etching exhibition that are at all of the same grade as these water colors in the matter of quality are, strange to say, by two of the Munich men, [Walter] Shirlaw and Twachtman. The latter’s “Snow Landscape” and the former’s “Italia” and illustrations to Hawthorne’s stories have really “the gift,” to quote Dr. [Seymour] Haden’s preface again, “of appealing directly and personally to the sympathies, the tastes, and the aspirations others.” That is the case because their authors felt keenly the impressions they were striving to convey, and did not make of their work a merely mechanical or intellectual exercise.[1]
Depicting a view looking across a snow-covered countryside this etching is related to two oil paintings, both titled Winter Landscape (OP.318 and OP.529). Features that Twachtman repeated are the figures isolated on a path in OP.318 and the thawing brook in OP.529. In the present image, he used the white paper for the unifying properties of the snow, against which the animated aspects of the scene are revealed: the sinuous movement of the emerging brook, the long line of the path on which the figures travel, and the solitary house nestled against hills and set off by a meandering fence. In the sky, he used the exposed paper for billowing clouds shaped with delicate curving lines.
The work was titled Winter, Avondale in 1966 Cincinnati.
The impression of this etching in the Cincinnati Art Museum, illustrated here, is a lifetime print.
[1] The catalogue of the exhibition, including Haden's essay, is unlocated.
From Wickenden 1921
Winter, Avondale, depicts the season and the element that inspired so many of the artist’s later pictures. The broad mass of light snow extending across the foreground on the right is broken by the few accents of a roadway leading up the valley along which trudge two small figures toward the darker horizon beyond. Bare trees rise here and there against the rolling clouds of the sky. On the left, a little cottage nestles against the hillside, and the waters of a stream darkened by contrast with the surrounding snow, zigzags towards us. There is a reality in its wintry atmosphere, and a firmness in its execution evidently obtained direct from nature [p. 31].
From Spangenberg 2000
Gravé avec économie, son Paysage de neige (fig.2) dépeint la beauté et la paix de la campagne en hiver, sujet qu’il ne traite qu’une fois en gravure mais peint à maintes reprises. Cette oeuvre gravée est peut-être l’une de cette année les conduit en Angleterre, Hollande, Belgique, Italie et Allemagne.
- Museum website (cincinnatiartmuseum.org)