Catalogue Entry
Twachtman’s only design for a book cover was used on an 1896 volume of children’s verse, W. V.: Her Book, by the British poet and journalist William Canton (1845–1926). Canton wrote the book for his daughter Winifred Vida (1891–1901). Twachtman’s design—shown as mirror images on front and back—reveals his attraction to the flatness and sinuous properties of Art Nouveau.
The image is of a young girl in a large hat and holding a red flower, who sits beside a brook that winds into the distance. Although Twachtman created a decorative composition, the image is also a personal one, as in it he symbolically evoked his daughter Elsie, who died at age nine from scarlet fever on January 13, 1895. The red flowers suggest poppies, a symbol of sleep, peace, and death since antiquity (the flower was often reproduced on ancient Greek tombstones). The girl in the image, with reddish hair, resembles Elsie (whose hair appears to be red in images such such as a pastel P.901, portraying her at about age two and a half). Here the girl depicted wears an overly large hat like that in which Twachtman rendered Elsie in his pastel of her with her older sister Marjorie (Marjorie and Elsie, ca. 1891, P.903).
The child in the image has a faraway gaze evoking the afterlife, while the sinuous brook evokes the theme of the “Voyage of Life,” in which travel along watercourses symbolizes the path of a human life. Twachtman addressed the theme in his Sailing in the Mist images (see, for example, OP.976), rendered in response to Elsie’s death. For Twachtman, a book written by an author for his daughter provided an opportunity to pay tribute to the memory of his own beloved daughter.
