Description
The Project : In the fall of 2018, the GHS completed a remarkable expansion that achieved not only new gallery spaces for the art collections and for special exhibitions, but also developed the garden and landscape facilities, and established programming that effectively links the indoor/art and outdoor nature/spaces. The re-conceived GHS is now in the position to share a richer story about the artists and natural setting associated with one of the most significant artists’ colonies in the US. The GHS has chosen to inaugurate its new special exhibition galleries with an exhibition of paintings by John Henry Twachtman, one of the most talented of the American Impressionists and an artist who made Greenwich his home during the most productive years of his career. It is fitting that the GHS will focus on Twachtman, whose devotion to his nearby Round Hill Road home and gardens was as foundational to his work as Giverny was to Claude Monet. The project will offer a new consideration of the artist’s aesthetic priorities, exercised both on his environment and in his drawings and paintings; and it will chart the development and the refinement of the two in tandem. The exhibition and catalogue will be executed by Lisa Peters, who has devoted the past 30 years to documenting and publishing about the artist. She and a consulting architectural historian will bring their specializations to bear on the clarification of the chronology of Twachtman’s significant Greenwich-based production, and will consider its place in late-nineteenth-century American painting.
Rationale for Fundin g: Over the course of the past two years, as the GHS carried out their major capital project, the staff has engaged the American Art Program in numerous conversations about potential funding. This project emerged as the best option, even though it is a loan exhibition that would have been too modest to have garnered funding in the annual exhibition competition. John Henry Twachtman’s career has become synonymous with Connecticut Impressionism. He was among the three or so very best American practitioners of Impressionism, and the works that he created at his Greenwich property are some of his most evocative and complex. There is no question of his importance, or of the depth and quality of his work. The project is conceived on the proper scale, and will feature notable works. The presentation will have the advantage of being informed by new research and fresh thinking about this body of work. The exhibition and catalogue will contribute to the field as well as to the visitorship at the GHS.
The grant represents an opportunity for the AAP to support a project that is entirely on mission for the organization, and one that will fortify the launch of the new GHS, allowing it to link its local work to the larger sphere of American Impressionist studies. The Twachtman project will also allow the AAP to continue its recent work in supporting individual member institutions of the Historic Artists Homes and Studios (HAHS) cohort. As with the recent project at Chesterwood, the Twachtman project at GHS will strength the organization’s identity, and will project it well beyond its usual reach.