Connecticut Idyll

Thomas Connors | The Magazine Antiques | January 3, 2022

Home. For most of us, it is the heart’s happy place. For creative types, it can be prison or paradise, a cage that keeps one from working, or the setting where one works best. And then there are those like Frank Lloyd Wright and Claude Monet. The architect’s estate, Taliesin, in the hills of the Wisconsin countryside, was both abode and manifesto—a working studio and classroom, where acolytes gathered and often gave their all to learn from the ever-confident master. Monet turned his home in the French village of Giverny into a place both of this world and apart from it—a garden of the artist’s mind as much as of the earth.

The Greenwich Paintings of John Henry Twachtman

by Lisa N. Peters | American Art Review | Vol. XXXIV No. 3 2021

The Cincinnati-born artist John Henry Twachtman (1853-1902) reached artistic maturiry while living from 1890 to 1899 in Greenwich, Connecticut. There he created the paintings of his home and property for which he earned a reputation as the most original of the leading American Impressionists. Life and Art: The Greenwich Paintings of john Henry Twachtman rakes a new holistic approach to Twachtman’s Greenwich oeuvre, considering it as encompassing both his work and the aesthetic modifications he made on his property, with land and architecture as his media. The exhibition and its catalogue explore the interactive dynamic between art and place that occurred over time, as Twachtman’s involvement in his surroundings evolved. Demonstrating the coming together of life and art for Twachtman in Greenwich, the show suggests a paradigm for similar considerations of an artist’s relationship to home and work.