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About Leonard Ochtman
Essentially a tonalist with Dutch roots, Ochtman ended up in Cos Cob, working in the impressionist technique, as Cos Cob, Winter fully demonstrates. First, he was trained at the Art Students League. With his friend Charles Warren Eaton (1856-1937) Ochtman visited Europe, including France and Holland. In 1896, or perhaps even earlier,60 he met the group of artists at the Holley House in Cos Cob, including Childe Hassam and Clark Voorhees (1871-1933). J. Alden Weir conducted a painting class there in 1892 and 1893. By 1894, Ochtman was also giving outdoor painting instruction across the river at Mianus. The impressionist Theodore Robinson (1852-1896) was in Cos Cob that summer with Allen Butler Talcott (1867-1908), who returned the following summer. By this time, Cos Cob was a "regular rendezvous for impressionists."61 Elmer Livingston MacRae (1875-1953) came a year after Ochtman in 1897 and settled there permanently a few years later. A canvas that seems to represent Ochtman’s turning point to impressionism is On the Mianus River, signed and dated 1896 (The Bruce Museum, Greenwich). Typically, Ochtman would take plein-air color notes, relying on memory to finish canvases in his studio, therefore, he kept one foot in tonalist territory.62
Ochtman was well recognized and won a slew of awards, including a silver medal at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, the Shaw Fund Prize from the Society of American Artists a year later, two gold medals at the St. Louis Universal Exposition in 1904, where he exhibited five landscapes, and later in 1915, a silver medal at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Ochtman was named National Academician in 1904. Despite his fame, he and his wife, the painter Mina Fonda Ochtman (1862-1924) were rarely secure financially and they had to take in boarders at their home, while they grew their own fruit and vegetables and raised chickens. Ochtman was one of the founders of the Greenwich Society of Artists in 1912, and served as its president between 1919 and 1932. |
Paintings by Leonard Ochtman
| Cos Cob, Winter |
| oil on canvas: 30 x 25 inches |
| signed: lower left |
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Click Picture to Enlarge
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