Lavender and Old Lace

Artist Charles Ephraim Burchfield (American, 1893 - 1967)

Date1939 -1947

MediumWatercolor on paper

Dimensions37 × 50 in. (94 × 127 cm)
Frame Dimension: 45 1/4 × 58 × 1 1/2 in. (114.9 × 147.3 × 3.8 cm)

ClassificationsWatercolor

Credit LineCharles F. Smith Fund

Terms

Object number1952.29

Description"Lavender and Old Lace" is depicts a Victorian country house, dirt roads and barns in the distance, situated among overgrown foliage, majestic elms, lilacs, and tulip patches under a swirling portentous sky. The painting, completed in 1947, was conceived seventeen years earlier, when Burchfield encountered the farmhouse during a walk in the countryside outside Buffalo. He noted the lilacs "in their first full glory and the contrast of their lavender with the old gray and tobacco brown, weather beaten wood." (1) He returned several years later to make two small watercolors that focus on the house. In 1939 he revisited the scene and made a sketch that formed the basis of the present picture. Burchfield could paint only in May, when the lilacs were "partly open, so the general effect of the color was an incredibly rich reddish lavender." (2) In 1942 and 1947 Burchfield once again visited the plot. In 1942 he erased most of his initial sketch, expanding the composition by adding strips of paper at the edges. The new picture encompassed more of the natural setting and the mood Burchfield wanted to portray. "At last," he recalled, "it seemed to embody all that I had felt about the old abandoned house, the tragedy of the decay of a beautiful place, contrasted with the ravishing beauty of lilacs in bloom." (3)
"Lavender and Old Lace", painted and reworked during the transitional years from the 1930s to the 1940s, combines the artist's middle and late styles. The painting retains much of the pictorial depth and volumetric form of the realist works of his middle period, as well as their American subject matter. But the predominance of nature signals the transition into the late period. Also characteristic of the late works is the expressive intensity with which the early style reemerges.
From 1916 to 1918 Burchfield developed a calligraphic shorthand based on simplified, mostly linear, motifs and patterns. In 1917 he invented two sets of ideographs. The first, which appears as zigzagging and repeating linear gestures, was designed to capture the sounds and vibrations of nature in visual form. The second, which often appears as macabre anthropomorphic forms, was created to signify human emotions or states of mind. He catalogues this second set of ideographs, entitling them "Conventions for Abstract Thoughts." These inventions contributed to a highly individual style in which decorative motif and pattern become symbolic projections of the artist's personal conflicts as well as an expression of his rhapsodic celebration of nature.
"Lavender and Old Lace" heralds the return of this style, as it integrates Burchfield's semiabstract conventions into an otherwise straightforward farm scene. In a richly orchestrated interplay of motifs the dentated foliage of the bushes, the grass, the flamelike petaled flowers, the orioles, and the writhing arabesques of the elm branches--Burchfield portrays nature as an animated, vital lifeforce. The painting also revives Burchfield's early practice of representing trees and forests as Gothic architectural structures; the intersecting branches of the elms appear as the leaded frames of stained-glass windows. A strange light, which seems to come from within the tree, passes through the Gothic arch-shaped openings in the branches, giving this common country scene a majestic, ethereal quality.
In pitting the exuberance of nature against the decay and deterioration of the farmhouse and barns, Burchfield ultimately contrasts nature's powers of regeneration with the inevitability of human mortality. The recurrence of this theme in many of his most celebrated works of this period suggests that the artist may have been contemplating his own mortality. The intense vitality of nature in Lavender and Old Lace may signify as well the renewal of the creative energies of his youth.

RMS
Bibliography:
Charles Burchfield Archives, Burchfield-Penney Art Center, State University College at Buffalo; Joseph S. Trovato, "Charles Burchfield: Catalogue of Paintings in Private and Public Collections" (Utica: Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, 1970); John I. H. Baur, "The Inlander: Life and Work of Charles Burchfield, 1893-1967" (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1982; J. Benjamin Townsend, "Charles Burchfield's Journals: The Poetry of Place" (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993); Nannette V. Maciejunes, et al., "The Paintings of Charles Burchfield: North by Midwest", exhib. cat. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997).

Notes:
1 . Burchfield to NBMAA, July 4, 1953, NBMAA files.
2 . Burchfield, journal entry, May 27, 1939, Charles Burchfield Archives, Burchfield-Penney Art Center, State University College at Buffalo.
3 . Burchfield to NBMAA.

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