The Magazine Antiques | 2022

In Connecticut, the Greenwich Historical Society has finally been able to mount Life and Art: The Greenwich Paintings of John Henry Twachtman. The show was meant to go on view last fall, but that plan was scotched thanks to flooding caused by Hurricane Ida. The exhibition examines the artworks created by the American impressionist while living in a farmhouse in Greenwich.

Art and Antiques | November 2022

THROUGH January 22 the Greenwich Historical Society will stage a major exhibition for impressionist John Henry Twachtman featuring his home and surroundings in Greenwich, Connecticut. The famed artist lived in the area from 1890 through 1899 and is considered to be when he painted some of his best-known works. The show, titled “Life and Art: The Greenwich Paintings of John Henry Twachtman”, was curated by Lisa N. Peters, Ph.D., an independent scholar and author on several Twachrman and American art publications.

COS COB, CONN. – “I can see how necessary it is to live always in the country – at all seasons of the year.” American Impressionist John Henry Twachtman (1853-1902) shared this certainty with close friend and fellow artist Julian Alden Weir in 1891, a few days after adding acreage to his small farmstead in Greenwich, Conn. Twachtman’s guiding belief in the inspirational power of place and nature shines through the exhibition and catalog titled “Life and Art: The Greenwich Paintings of John Henry Twachtman.” Visitors can take in the intriguing presentation at the Greenwich Historical Society in Cos Cob until January 22.

By Maggie Dimock | Connecticut Explored Inc. | Summer 2022

In a letter scribbled on stationery from The Players club in New York in the winter of 1902, now held in the Holley-MacRae Papers in the collection of the Greenwich Historical Society, American Impressionist artist John Henry Twachtman (1853 – 1902) put into words the dislocation and exhaustion of city living: “I wish I were back. The town is using me up. I am on the go from morning until night and nothing doing. Always busy about some damned unnecessary thing and spending money to beat the band and to no purpose. And I also miss the painting.”

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.

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.