Horseshoe Falls, Niagara

John Henry Twachtman, like many of the artists who studied in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, brought back not so much a passion for French Impressionism's science of optical effects as a high regard for the naturalism of the French Barbizon school, whose leading artists Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796 - 1875) and Charles-Francois Daubigny (1817 - 1878) exhibited a marked fondness for paysages intimes, or intimate rural landscapes. It was not the vast grandeur of nature, beloved of the Hudson River School, but the inherent poetics of landscape that appealed to Twachtman. In Horseshoe Falls, Niagara, he takes on as subject one of the preeminent sites of nineteenth-century American landscape painting, and not as memorialized national icon but as natural phenomenon.

Twachtman, who was well acquainted with Japanese art as both connoisseur and collector, was especially enthusiastic about an exhibition of Japanese prints he saw in the fall of 1893 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In 1894 he visited the Buffalo physician and professor of anatomy Charles Cary and his wife, the artist Evelyn Rumsey Cary. During the winter and the summer, Twachtman painted fourteen views of Niagara Falls. The paintings indicate a dialogue with Eastern aesthetic values. In Horseshoe Falls, the horizon line is pushed almost to the top; the falls themselves occupy the whole composition, virtually eclipsing the sky, rendered as a mere sliver of mist-laden atmosphere. If earlier artists dwelled on the iconic stature of the falls, for Twachtman they constitute a purely personal encounter.