Oyster Boats, North River,

1879

Twachtman began his career practicing the dark, direct, vigorous style of painting taught at the Royal Academy in Munich, where he was a student. Returning to the United States in 1878, he settled in New York and was elected to the progressive Society of American Artists the following year, when Oyster Boats was painted. Typical of the artist’s dexterous manipulation of paint in highly visible brushstrokes during this initial phase of his career, this work exudes a gritty immediacy appropriate to its subject: a group of oyster-dredging sloops docked along southern Manhattan, most likely on the Hudson River around Tenth Street. Although Twachtman died before turning fifty, his art evolved through several distinct stylistic phases, suggesting the restlessness with which he and other artists came to terms with the challenges and possibilities of Modernism at the end of the nineteenth century.