Catalogue Entry
On a commission from the New York firm of Stone and Kimball, Twachtman created his only design for a poster, which publicized Harold Frederic's 1896 novel, The Damnation of Theron Ware, or Illumination (Illumination was the title for the book in England.) Twachtman created the work as a pastel (location unknown). It was turned into a lithograph by Stone and Kimball. For the firm, Twachtman also produced the design for the cover of W. V: Her Book, containing two books of verse by William Canton (I.933).
Although Frederic's book takes place in a small town in the Adirondacks and is a tortured Faustian tale, Twachtman incorporated imagery in his rendering that was personal. In the book, the protagonist, Theron, a naive Methodist minister, loses his faith when he gains exposure to a sophisticated, literary world. As a result, he abandons the goodness and happiness in his life to fulfill a fantasy. In the poster, Twachtman depicted Celia Madden, the red-haired Irish organist, who introduces Theron to the cultured realm that entices him to leave his old moral-bound self behind. In one instance, Theron sees Celia through the stained-glass window in a church where she is playing the organ. Frederic writes that a halo was about her head, "engirdling rich, flowing waves of reddish hair, the lights in which glowed like a flame."[1] In another instance, Theron sees the "rose-tinted, beautiful countenance, framed as if asleep in the billowing luxuriance of unloosed auburn hair.[2]
The personal aspect of the work is demonstrated in Twachtman's use of his wife as the model for Madden; the subject bears a close resemblance to the portrait he created of Martha in 1881, the year of their wedding (OP.533). In both images, he depicted his subject with a pensive expression and long flowing hair. Perhaps Twachtman felt there were similarities between Celia and Martha. Celia played the organ and Martha played the piano; both were opinionated and intellectual.
For the background, Twachtman sent his son Alden to the garden at their home in Greenwich to cut a grapevine that he used as a source for the shapes of the grape leaves that surround the figure.[3]
The poster's art nouveau style appears influenced by a lithograph and letterpress poster created by the French artist Eugène Grasset's for the 1894 Salon des Cent Exposition in Paris (see https://www.moma.org/collection/works/5372). Twachtman owned a copy of Grasset's poster; a photograph featuring Martha with her daughters Marjorie (about age twelve) and Violet (as an infant) shows it hanging on the wall of the living room in the Twachtman home in Greenwich (fig. 1).
In addition to the Metropolitan, other collections in which this poster can be found are Columbia University, New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
[1] Frederic 1893, p. 77.
[2] Frederic 1893, p. 199.
[3] Twachtman Clipping File, Prints Division, New York Public Library, letter from William H. Bender Jr., 1991. Cited in Baskett 1999, p. 120.
J. H. Twachtman has been invited into the poster business and has succumbed. His announcement of a book for Stone & Kimball shows one of those young women who exist on posters, rather empty and featureless, yet composed and decorative, who is half surrounded with green leaves and blue sky. The peculiarity of the work is that it is done in pastel, instead of oil or water color, and that the lithographers have caught his touch and the brisk, broken lines of the colored chalk with remarkable accuracy. It is an easy medium, after one learns to work on it, and the success of this example may lead other artists into the same field.
- Museum website (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/339320)