John Henry Twachtman

Art Brokerage: John Henry Twachtman American Artist: b. 1853-1902. He was a protege of Frank Duveneck, a friend and teacher, who in 1875 invited the young artist to accompany him to Munich. There Twachtman adopted the characteristic dark palette and rapid open brushwork of his Munich colleagues. After refining his painting skills on a trip to Venice in 1877, he returned to the United States and developed a forceful, realist manner, capturing the energy of urban life in Cincinnati and New York. Twachtman departed for Paris in 1883 with his wife and son to study with the popular teachers associated with the Académie Julian. In the late 1880s, Twachtman settled in Greenwich, Connecticut and painted numerous landscapes on his 17-acre farm repeatedly during different seasons, seeking to convey his personal response to the sensuous aspects of nature. By the mid-1890s, Twachtman had become fully identified with the Impressionist movement, and American critics often compared him to Claude Monet. In 1897, Twachtman became a founding member of the Ten American Painters (or "The Ten"), a group of artists who seceded from the Society of American Artists and exhibited together for the next twenty years. Of The Ten, J. Alden Weir, Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf, Frank Benson and Twachtman were united by their rejection of descriptive art in favor of more subjective, innovative interpretations of nature.