During the late 19th century and the early years of the 20th century, Cos Cob was a popular artists’ colony on the north shore of Long Island Sound near Greenwich, Connecticut. It was there that aspiring young artists came to work with and to be taught by one of America's finest Impressionists, John Henry Twachtman (1853-1902). Twachtman, who had been born in Cincinnati, Ohio, first studied there with native son Frank Duveneck and later joined him in Munich for further study. Dissatisfied with the dark “Munich style” as it was then called, Twachtman moved on to the Académie Julian in Paris in 1883, where, under the influence of the plein air painters, he lightened his palette considerably. Upon his return to the United States in 1886 he bought a 17-acre farm near Greenwich and divided his time between landscape painting and teaching, in New York at the Art Students League and at Cooper Union, as well as at the Cos Cob school he founded. In 1897, he also became one of the founding members of “The Ten,” a group of principally New England painters who worked in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and which had been founded as a protest against the conservatism of current American art exhibitions.