Fine Art – John Henry Twachtman –
American Impressionist Painter
Fine Art is a term used to describe a painting or drawing,
printmaking, photography, illustration or sculpture that is
primarily intended for aesthetics as opposed to utility.
The term does not describe the quality of the work but
frequently rather a classic or academic approach to a
particular art form usually in a more traditional manner.
For the most part crafts are excluded from the definition.
The public, in general, tends to consider fine art to consist
of painting, drawing and sculpture. More broadly, fine art
does, in fact, include creative photography, and illustration.
Here in the series of videos that follow and the descriptive
blogs that accompany them, we’ll focus primarily upon
painting, drawing, art photography, and sculpture. Initially,
we’ll focus upon paintings of North American and European origin
because we are more likely to encounter them and they will be of
greater interest to us.
One of the historical purposes of painting was to provide an accurate
record of the world observed by the artist who created the painting.
The artists who created the paintings we have come to appreciate
from the mid 1800s on were no longer constrained by the necessity
to create an accurate historical record but rather could create in an
unconstrained stylistic sense, conceptual if you will. Hence,
impressionism, postimpressionism, Fauvism, expressionism, cubism
and Dadaism and their subsets arose in sequential order. Although
none of them fully or mainly supplanted the styles that went before them.
The video we are presenting today is of an American painting by
John Henry Twachtman, one of America’s greatest landscape painters.
Twachtman showed great skill in depicting natural scenery such as
snow upon tree branches and other winter scenes. Further, he was
a master of color values. One of the founders in 1898 of “The 10” a
group of American artists dissatisfied with professional art associations,
he painted on the East coast of the United States from Connecticut
north to Massachusetts.
Twachtman was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1853 and trained initially
under Frank Duveneck in Cincinnati. He then continued his training
in Europe, specifically in Munich, Germany. There he associated with
William Merritt Chase and Frank Duveneck. He returned to America
briefly but then moved to Paris, France in 1883 where he further
studied art. Although not a major commercial success his work was
excellent and endures today. Felled by a brain aneurysm he died in
1902 at age 49. Twachtman’s works are found in numerous major
museums including the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in
Washington, DC.
To view the video click on the link below.
