Catalogue Entry
Probably shown as Connecticut Hills in the 1893 exhibition at the American Art Galleries, of works by Twachtman, Julian Alden Weir, Claude Monet, and Paul-Albert Besnard, this painting represents the artist's Greenwich home, seen from the hillside to its north. This is a vantage point Twachtman chose often in the summer, but here he captured it in mid-winter, depicting his home just to the left of the canvas center within a panoramic view of a snow-covered landscape and under an overcast sky suggestive of the imminent arrival of a new snowfall. In the painting, he accentuated the unity of land and sky in which his home was nestled but not overwhelmed. Its red brick chimney at the eastern end of the dwelling, the repeating triangles of the dormer in the second floor of the newer section of the home (at the right), and the gable over the back entryway convey its vitality and self-sufficiency. The small rectangle in the middle ground is the birdhouse that was another of the artist's creations intended for shelter. The family barn and its dovecote, in perspective on the lower left, draw the viewer on a diagonal along the stone wall at the side of Round Hill Road to the home. At the far left, the curve of the road is echoed in the artist's overhead view of the stone wall that extended a north-south axis through the backyard of the dwelling.
The painting was titled Greenwich Hills in the artist’s 1905 memorial exhibition at Knoedler Galleries, New York. Remaining unsold, it was returned to the artist’s estate. In 1909 it was exhibited at the Alaska-Yukon exhibition in Seattle and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts annual. A critic reviewing the latter show for the Philadelphia Inquirer remarked: “Twachtman’s ‘Greenwich Hills,’ with its profound insight and truthfulness to nature, is the best canvas in the room. It is a creation drawn from the infinite.”
The work was probably lent to the 1905 and 1909 shows by the artist’s wife, even though she was not credited in the catalogue, as in 1910, her name appears as the painting’s owner in the catalogue for an exhibition at the Lotos Club. Martha Twachtman probably also lent the painting to the annual of the Carnegie Institute in 1911, the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, and the annual of the Detroit Museum of Art in 1918. In 1919 the painting was in the exhibition of eighteen of Twachtman’s works held at Macbeth Gallery, where it was illustrated and described in the catalogue: "All nature is asleep as winter holds the landscape in its icy grip. Everything is silent, so silent that we feel a whispered word would break the spell. The snowdrifts piled high, mass upon mass, in the foreground all but submerge the little cottage just beyond, the home of the artist and the sole suggestion of life in this frozen scene. This is not merely a picture of winter the artist has given up, it is the very spirit of winter, the seeming inertness of Nature at this season which he has tried to interpret and which he has expressed with a fine idealism and subtle tonality."
The painting finally found a home, when it was purchased from Macbeth by Mary G. Ellis (1873–1956), a Worcester art collector and the wife of the publisher of the Worcester Telegram and the Evening Gazette (Worcester). Ellis donated it as part of a large gift to the Worcester Art Museum in 1940. Nine years later, the museum sold the painting to the scholar and dealer Leroy Ireland, who brought it back to Macbeth in 1952. By 1968, the painting had been purchased from Macbeth by T. Edward Hanley (1893–1969) and his wife Tullah (d. 1982), of Bradford, Pennsylvania.[1] T. Edward Hanley, a noted book collector and philanthropist who distributed his art and books to many museums and libraries, donated the work to the Denver Art Museum in 1974.
[1] On Hanley, see http://web.sbu.edu/friedsam/archives/hanley/TE_Hanley.htm, accessed March 18, 2016.
- Museum website (https://www.denverartmuseum.org/en/object/1974.433)