Flowers
This conversation is connected to Flowers.
John Henry Twachtman was a founding member of The Ten, a group of American Impressionists who broke from the established art organizations in 1898 to exhibit together on their own terms. Here is another Twachtman pastel, also in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Flowers dates from around 1900, near the end of his life — he died in 1902 at forty-nine from a ruptured appendix. Pale pink blossoms on thin dark stems emerge from layered strokes of blue, teal, and green, all applied over raw brown paper that shows through everywhere and warms the entire composition. Twachtman preferred to paint what he called "bits" — close-up fragments of his Greenwich property rather than panoramic views — and his pastels push this further than his oils, dissolving the subject almost entirely into color and texture. The flowers are barely there, more suggested than described.