John Henry Twachtman

John Henry Twachtman was a man of many talents, ranging from etching and drawing to painting; the latter being his ticket into fame as a great American Impressionist. On August 4, 1853, Twachtman was born into a German immigrant family in Cincinnati, Ohio. For a few years, he studied at Ohio Mechanics Institute but decided to enroll at McMicken School of Design in 1871 to pursue his love of painting. Within two years, he started travelling to Europe to expand his knowledge and skills by studying the greats and attending the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich in 1875. After two years of study, Twachtman returned home to the United States to teach briefly at a woman’s art school in Cincinnati and will teach sporadically throughout his art career in the US and Europe.

Through the years, his styles and tones changed, but he remained faithful to his landscape designs and developed a love for a farm that he would come to own in Greenwich, Connecticut. This farm and its natural habitat would be the subject of many of his paintings up until the day he suddenly died on August 8, 1902 of a brain aneurysm.