loading loading
John Henry Twachtman Catalogue Raisonné
An online catalogue by Lisa N. Peters, Ph.D., in collaboration with the Greenwich Historical Society

Catalogue Entry

enlarge
Keywords
OP.820
The Road
Alternate title: A Breezy Day
ca. 1888
Oil on canvas
20 x 16 in. (50.8 x 40.6 cm)
[Signed lower right by the artist's wife: J. H. Twachtman–]
Arkell Museum at Canajoharie, New York (317236)
Provenance
(Macbeth, 1919);
George Barr McCutcheon;
to (American Art Galleries, New York, January 31, 1929, McCutcheon sale, lot 7, as A Breezy Day);
to Bartlett Arkell;
to present collection, 1929.
Literature
American Art Association 1929
A Choice Little Collection: Paintings by the American Masters and a Number of Examples of the Barbizon and Dutch Schools Formed by the Late George Barr McCutcheon. Auction catalogue, January 31, 1929. New York: American Art Association, 1929, lot 7 ill. in b/w, as A Breezy Day.
American Magazine of Art 1929
American Magazine of Art 20 (April 1929), p. 184, as A Breezy Day.
Hale 1957
Hale, John Douglass. "Life and Creative Development of John H. Twachtman." 2 vols. Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 1957. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1958, vol. 2, p. 434 (catalogue G, no. 77), as A Breezy Day. (Hale concordance).
Canajoharie Library and Art Gallery 1969
Canajoharie Library and Art Gallery. Catalogue of the Permanent Collection of the Canajoharie Library and Art Gallery. Canajoharie, N.Y.: Canajoharie Library and Art Gallery, 1969, no. 63, as The Road.
Commentary

This painting was in the Twachtman estate, from which it was sold by Macbeth Gallery in 1919. Its purchaser was the novelist and playwright George Barr McCutcheon (1866–1928). In 1929 the painting, then titled A Breezy Day, was included in the 1929 sale of McCutcheon’s collection, following his death in the previous year. According to a note in the catalogue, it sold for $2,600 to the industrialist, philanthropist, and art collector Bartlett Arkell (1862–1947), who was president, beginning in 1893, of the Imperial Packing Company in Canajoharie, New York, which became the Beech-Nut Packing Company in 1900. Arkell founded the Canajoharie Library and Art Gallery in 1924, when the painting became part of that collection. The museum changed its name to the Arkell Museum in 2007.

The painting’s site is likely to be Branchville, Connecticut, where the Twachtmans spent the summer of 1888, near the home of Julian Alden Weir. There the artist turned from the scenes of peaceful mist-enveloped waterways of his French period, to create more dynamic images of rural New England.