?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,200 - $ 1,800
JOHN HENRY TWACHTMAN Docks at Newport.
Etching, 1889 126x177 mm; 4x6 inches, full margins. Signed "Twchtman" and titled by another hand in pencil, lower margin. A very good impression of this scarce, American Impressionist print.
Twachtman (1853-1902) followed a close career path to fellow Midwesterners Franck Duveneck and Otto Bacher. He was raised in Cincinnati and joined Duveneck, whom he had met as an art teacher there, in Munich in 1875. In 1877, Twachtman was in Venice with Duveneck and William Merritt Chase. He was back and forth between Italy, Germany and Cincinnati during the early 1880s, crossing paths with but never meeting Whistler. By 1886, he and his family had moved to Cos Cob, Connecticut, where he became friends with fellow impressionist artists Julian Alden Weir (whose father, John Ferguson Weir, had been a drawing instructor of Whistler's at West Point) and Chile Hassam. Weir landed a teaching position at The Art Students League in New York in 1889, which he held until his death.
All of Twachtman's 20 or so etchings are stylistically Whistlerian in their sketchiness and freely-drawn nature. Most of his etched compositions recall Whistler's Venice prints, not surprising considering his closeness to Duveneck during these years, as in this work with its watery foreground and the reflections of the dock and wharf. Baskett 133.
