I take photos of John Henry Twachtman's paintings whenever I see them at museums, but when I get them home and look at them on my computer screen I find that there's no there there. One has to experience them in person. That's why I didn't bother to make the images in this commentary not much bigger than thumbnails. Larger wouldn't do any good.
These two works of his are Country House in Winter, Cos Cob and Hemlock Pool (left to right), owned by the Addison Gallery of American Art here in Andover. I have seen them many times, mostly recently yesterday afternoon. Both were painted in Greenwich, just a couple of years before the artist's death in 1902. If I were a collector type and if I had the money, Twachtman's paintings are what I would collect. It's because they capture the exact, hazy light of Greenwich in winter that I remember from my childhood, specifically when I was playing outdoors, often sledding on the golf course behind our house, on what we kids from the neighborhood called Suicide Hill. We trudged through the snow to get there. Boys rode toboggans. We girls had our Flexible Flyers. We would be out there for hours. I don't remember getting hungry or cold. We were too absorbed in the play, and the fear, since going down that hill was a slightly dangerous activity, especially when a train of sleds and toboggans went down in a line together. I experienced more than one crash at the bottom. When we had the tag sale after the family house on Morningside Drive was sold, someone remarked with sadness and a bit of a reprimand that my sled was part of it. Yes, it was. No one had used it in decades, and that was the least of what we were letting go that day.
I didn't know at first why those Twachtman paintings gripped me. Soon I noticed that other winter scenes painted in other parts of the country, or even in New England, didn't have that same "certain Slant of light." Emily Dickinson noted the slant in her part of Massachusetts, out in Northampton. On "Winter Afternoons --," she wrote, it "oppresses, like the Heft/Of Cathedral Tunes -– "
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us -–
We can find no scar,
But internal difference -–
Where the Meanings, are -–
None may teach it –- Any –-
'Tis the seal Despair –-
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air –-
When it comes, the Landscape listens –-
Shadows –- hold their breath –-
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –-
Twachtman claimed in a letter to a fellow painter to have loved nature in winter, and he painted winter scenes for a significant part of his life, particularly after his move to Greenwich, where he bought a seventeen-acre parcel on Round Hill in the back country, far from Cos Cob, where several of his painter-friends lived. Dickinson's poem is unambiguous on the connection between winter and death--just as Joyce was in "The Dead." But I don't think of death when I look at Country House or Hemlock Pool. I think of life.
These two works of his are Country House in Winter, Cos Cob and Hemlock Pool (left to right), owned by the Addison Gallery of American Art here in Andover. I have seen them many times, mostly recently yesterday afternoon. Both were painted in Greenwich, just a couple of years before the artist's death in 1902. If I were a collector type and if I had the money, Twachtman's paintings are what I would collect. It's because they capture the exact, hazy light of Greenwich in winter that I remember from my childhood, specifically when I was playing outdoors, often sledding on the golf course behind our house, on what we kids from the neighborhood called Suicide Hill. We trudged through the snow to get there. Boys rode toboggans. We girls had our Flexible Flyers. We would be out there for hours. I don't remember getting hungry or cold. We were too absorbed in the play, and the fear, since going down that hill was a slightly dangerous activity, especially when a train of sleds and toboggans went down in a line together. I experienced more than one crash at the bottom. When we had the tag sale after the family house on Morningside Drive was sold, someone remarked with sadness and a bit of a reprimand that my sled was part of it. Yes, it was. No one had used it in decades, and that was the least of what we were letting go that day.
I didn't know at first why those Twachtman paintings gripped me. Soon I noticed that other winter scenes painted in other parts of the country, or even in New England, didn't have that same "certain Slant of light." Emily Dickinson noted the slant in her part of Massachusetts, out in Northampton. On "Winter Afternoons --," she wrote, it "oppresses, like the Heft/Of Cathedral Tunes -– "
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us -–
We can find no scar,
But internal difference -–
Where the Meanings, are -–
None may teach it –- Any –-
'Tis the seal Despair –-
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air –-
When it comes, the Landscape listens –-
Shadows –- hold their breath –-
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –-
Twachtman claimed in a letter to a fellow painter to have loved nature in winter, and he painted winter scenes for a significant part of his life, particularly after his move to Greenwich, where he bought a seventeen-acre parcel on Round Hill in the back country, far from Cos Cob, where several of his painter-friends lived. Dickinson's poem is unambiguous on the connection between winter and death--just as Joyce was in "The Dead." But I don't think of death when I look at Country House or Hemlock Pool. I think of life.
RSS Feed
