Fine Art – John Henry Twachtman

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.

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