Artwork · 19th century · John Henry Twachtman

LeoTurn on Magnifier at the lower right and move slowly across the painting.
Full screen opens it edge to edge.Tap the painting to fill the screen.
Spread two fingers to look closer.

Icebound

John Henry Twachtmanc. 1889Oil on canvas64.2 × 76.6 cm

Make a frame or mug with this painting →

At a glance

Text size

A half-frozen stream winds between snowy banks on a quiet winter day.
The American painter John Henry Twachtman painted it around 1889, near his home in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Using little more than white and blue-green, he separates snow, ice, and open water with the brush alone.

Reading the picture

5 places to look closer

Tap a number on the painting to jump to its note, or a close-up to see that spot in the whole picture.

Zoom into the tree at the upper right. Dabs of orange cling around its gray trunk. On this almost white canvas, these leaves are nearly the only warm color. Dry leaves that held on into winter glow in the snow like embers.
Look at the water left of center. Rounded mounds of white paint float there, laid on in curling strokes. They could be snow piled on hidden rocks, or water swirling past them. In this still scene, those curves give the eye something moving.
Now go down to the dark water at the lower left. Brown shows through the blue-green. It feels as if you can see stones and mud on the bottom where the stream has not frozen. The paint is layered and dragged, so the water looks deep and cold.
Zoom into the snowfield at the lower right. A few stalks of dry grass poke up as brown strokes. The snow around them is not plain white. Pale blue and gray are mixed into it.
Look into the bottom right corner. A thin signature, J. H. Twachtman, runs across the snow.

When it was painted

Around 1889 Twachtman was thirty-six. Born in Cincinnati, he had trained in Munich and Paris and was now settling near New York. He found a home on rural land in Greenwich, Connecticut. For the rest of his life, a little over a decade, he painted the land around that house again and again.

He lived there with his wife, Martha, and their children. Paintings alone did not pay the bills, so he taught at the Art Students League in New York. Between classes he came back to the same stream and the same hillsides and looked at them once more.

Twachtman loved snow above all. In a letter to a friend he wrote that nature is never lovelier than when it is snowing. Winter was often painted as bleak, but he saw frozen ground as a time for quiet thought and renewal.

His close friend was the painter J. Alden Weir, who also kept a farm in Connecticut. The two stayed near each other for years. In 1897 they joined other artists to form a group known as the Ten American Painters, which held its own exhibitions.

Twachtman died in 1902 in Gloucester, Massachusetts, at forty-nine. Fifteen years later, in 1917, this picture entered the Art Institute of Chicago.

Look again at the white swirls on the stream. The stream he painted again and again near his house is not fully frozen. It is still breathing under the snow.

The painter

John Henry Twachtman

1853–1902

All paintings by John Henry Twachtman →

Icebound

Questions to think about

Look for itHow many colors that are not white can you find in this snowy scene?
Why?Why do you think Twachtman kept painting the stream by his own house instead of famous faraway views?
What about you?He saw winter not as a sad season but as time to rest and think. In a life that always seems busy, when do you get a winter-like pause of your own?

Same period