John Henry Twachtman (1853–1902) was born on 4 August 1853 in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of German immigrants. As a boy he decorated window shades, as his father did, and he studied at the Ohio Mechanics Institute and the McMicken School of Design before coming under the influence of Frank Duveneck and the Munich school. He trained in Munich and later at the Académie Julian in Paris, and returned to America in 1886.
Around 1889 he bought a farm at Greenwich, Connecticut, and for the rest of the decade its fields, streams and waterfalls became his principal subject. His paintings of these places, often in snow or soft mist, are among the most refined of American Impressionism, with a pale, delicate palette. In 1897 he left the Society of American Artists with nine other painters to form The Ten American Painters, which held its first exhibition in 1898 at the Durand-Ruel Galleries in New York. He also taught, and ran an informal art school at Cos Cob, Connecticut.
From 1900 Twachtman spent his summers at Gloucester, Massachusetts. He died there suddenly on 8 August 1902, aged 49, of a brain aneurysm. Fellow artists revered him as a “painter’s painter”, though the public paid him little attention in his lifetime.