John Henry Twachtman, Reckless Visionary

John Henry Twachtman, Gloucester Harbor Scene, c. 1901

Twachtman's sense of design is utterly masterful. On a recent trip to Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, I sat for a while in front of the above painting and sketched it as a way of plumbing its mysteries. Deceptively simple, the interlocking geometric shapes, the subtle, asymmetrical arrangement of values, the vibrating colors - as with a lot of paintings I respond to, I experienced the whole thing gathering itself into a marvelous representation then threatening to collapse into random marks of colored paint only to gather itself once again into a representation on the verge of disintegration. 

John Henry Twachtman (1853 – 1902) was among a group of American Impressionists called The Ten who boycotted the commercial art market at the end of the 19th century. A restless experimenter, he pledged no allegiance to a single style. He was among the most original, modern, and poetic of his peers, either unwilling or unable to interest buyers in derivative or simply pretty images. His devotion to his personal vision brought him strong admiration from fellow artists, who deemed him a 'painter's painter' ahead of of his time.  

Twachtman, Edge of the Emerald Pool at Yellowstone

Few 19th century landscape artists were as willing or able to disregard convention and devote themselves to such a personal brand of Impressionism, not to mention such beautiful and radically simplified renderings of spontaneous experience. Look at the rich, boldly abstract color pattern in that Emerald Pool above! 


In Along the Fence (below), Twachtman takes a similar minimalist approach to big ideas. Here the treatment of humble subject matter, ennobled by a perfect degree of detail and a dignified composition, expresses the profound significance of the simplest dusty corner of the inhabited word. Twachtman's eye has singled out an anonymous series of warped, nailed-up boards mired in muddy earth-tones that, soaked as they are in generations of human presence, tell a strangely rich tale of human history expressed in the simplest imaginable terms. 


Thoreau said "a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone." By virtue of everything it leaves out, Along the Fence is an absolute treasure. 

Twachtman, Along the Fence

Here is Arques-la-Bataille, which some consider one of his greatest masterpieces. 

John Henry Twachtman, Arques-la-Bataille, 1885

As Linda Crank points out, there's a quiet circular composition underlying the whole: 


"First, the bold block of dark grass at center bottom commands the eye. Then the smaller clump to the middle left causes it to travel to the middle left. From there a variety of smaller shrubbery and grasses propel the vision around to the right in a circular motion. Strong horizontal lines emphasize the calmness of the foggy morning." 


Many of Twachtman's works, including Arques-la-Bataille, turn their backs on the established canon of Western aesthetics. Instead, they can often exhibit the sort of subtlety one finds in a Japanese garden, where objects are arranged in such a way as to relate at once to the random quality of "design" in nature and to our human hunger for the sense of a harmonious whole. I love the fresh, un-cliched design of the darks and lights in this tonalist piece:

Although I admit to having made pilgrimages to Gloucester, Rockport and similar locales, in this case, for me there's little mystique to where Twachtman painted. It's his absolute sincerity, his depth of thought and feeling, and his faithfulness to his responses to the immediate subject that make him great.


Twachtman's great paintings balance representation and abstraction in a very poetic, and at once very modern and classically restrained manner. His later works such as the Gloucester Harbour pictures above and below anticipate a style of painting that wouldn' t become popular until long after European Modernism came to America in 1911. One could do worse than to spend a day at the feet of such a master.

Twachtman, Goucester Harbor

A Striking Couple

Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, Peasant Boy at a Market (l), Peasant Girl Catching a Flea (r). c. 1715.

These two caught my eye at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts the other day.

I love their simplicity. I think it's a large part of their power. 

The painter, Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, is remembered as a successful artist of the late Baroque/Rococo period (c. 1680-1750). He studied with Crespi, one of the "Caravaggisti" (basically, hundreds of artists who painted in the Italian Baroque style of Caravaggio - i.e., darkish canvases in which piercing directional light dramatically pulls subjects out of the engulfing shadows).

Piazzetta here applies his own version of the style - but with his own sensibility. Where Caravaggio and most of his followers went for highly dramatic, often religious or mythological canvases, Piazzetta and to some extent Crespi sought a quiet serenity to be found in the unguarded moments of everyday lives.

Piazzetta, Peasant Boy at a Market

Perhaps the lack of pretense in Piazzetta is what makes him so different. Here, Piazzetta's, Peasant Boy at a Market appears simply at home in his own world, unconcerned by his own poverty as he is momentarily preoccupied with digging a presumably single, small coin from the folds of his little satchel. The same poise and unconcern radiates from the woman's face in the work's companion piece.

Piazzetta, Peasant Girl Catching a Flea.

In the painting of the woman, Piazzetta treats a theme that Crespi had also tackled - a woman removing a flea from her person. But whereas Crespi's painting candidly details the process with a rather harsh degree of realism only partly softened by the warm, womblike light pooling around his subject, Piazzetta's bolder, more stylized art fully and lovingly transforms the moment. It's Piazzetta's painting that more whole-heartedly redeems the common and sordid, the "all-too human."

The MFA suggests that as the son of a woodcarver, Piazetta brought a sculptural sensibility to the modeling of figures with light and shadow. Perhaps his humble origins informed his whole approach to painting, i.e. his "naturalistic images of ordinary life that are characterized by a dignified, sympathetic portrayal of his subject, often peasants," as the MFA says.The poetry in his work is wholly his own.

I think these paintings' lasting value springs not from anything innovative in Piazzetta's style but in his feeling for the world he knew, his sincerity. Sincerity in art is something one must feel or sense rather than see. La Farge defined it as the intention "to express what you care for most by the simplest means that will avail you... not your knowledge (of artistic representation) but your way of using it."

There's a sort of archetypal, universal quality in these two works, born of rendering ordinary people's lives with almost religious dignity, much as Millet did in the 1800s. They work beautifully together too.