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John Henry Twachtman American, 1853-1902 Portrait of Godfrey Twachtman, circa 1897 Oil on canvas 30 x 25 inches Provenance: Mr. and Mrs. Godfrey Twachtman, Independence, MO (Godfrey Twachtman was the artist's son) By descent to their daughter, Phyllis Twachtman, as of 1968 Exhibited: Vienna, Austria, Kunstforum, Impressionismus: Amerika - Frankreich - Russland (Impressionism: America - France - Russia), Oct. 25, 2002-Feb. 23, 2003, pp. 94, 95, color illus., cat. 25 New York, Spanierman Gallery, LLC, John Twachtman: A "Painter's Painter," May 4-Jun. 24, 2006. Literature: Impressionismus: Amerika - Frankreich - Russland (Impressionism: America - France - Russia). Vienna: Palace Editions, 2002, pp. 94, 95 color illus., cat. 25) Throughout his career, John Henry Twachtman was committed to landscape painting. In his few figural works, he portrayed his family exclusively, creating casual images in which he rendered his wife and children with the same attention to the decorative arrangement of forms within the picture plane as in his landscapes. His subject in this painting is his youngest child, Godfrey, born December 6, 1897. (Of his seven children, five survived to adulthood.) Twachtman used the opportunity of this scene to capture the play of a strong light falling across the white clothing worn by his infant son and the white chair behind him. A sense of the spiritual within the everyday exudes from the glowing image. At the same time, Twachtman's lively brushwork, varying throughout the work, reveals his delight in painting freely. His approach in this canvas was the opposite of the precise methods in antique drawing that he taught at New York's Art Students League; one of his students described him in this task as "a poet made to drag a cart, heavy with blocks of dead plaster." This painting will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonne of the work of John Henry Twachtman Lisa N. Peters, Ph.D. and Ira Spanierman. C The Spanierman Gallery, LLC