Homage to a winter painting

John Twachtman painted winter as well as anyone ever did (other American artists who aced the subject are here). His Winter, in the Phillips Collection, is a particularly nice example of snow, ice, and gray sky. Twachtman's snow scenes are justifiably famous among historians of American art; their broad expanses of whites and grays, their careful brushwork that emphasizes the paintings' surfaces, and their indistinct details read today as nearly proto-modern. It's not hard to find a harbinger of Robert Ryman in these pale landscapes.

But of course Twachtman wasn't painting in the late nineteenth century with abstraction of the 1960s and 1970s in mind. Instead, these paintings stand as terrific examples of Impressionist and Tonalist experiments with light and color (which is why Duncan Philips was such a fan). Twachtman evokes chill in the best possible way. Brr!