Charles Ephraim Burchfield
Charles Burchfield has come to be regarded as the preeminent painter of the inland American landscape. His works, primarily in watercolor, can be divided into three distinct phases: early expressive and decorative paintings of nature; realistic urban, industrial, and rural subjects of the 1920s and 1930s; and late paintings that return to nature, combining the fantasy and romantic vision of the early works with the stylistic realism of the middle period. His oeuvre contains many abrupt changes in style and subject matter, but is unified by a consistent, intensely romantic vision.
Burchfield was born in Ashtabula, Ohio. After his father died in 1898, his family moved to Salem, Ohio. At an early age, Burchfield was drawn to nature, spending most of his time studying plants and weather or sketching in the Ohio countryside. He admired John Burroughs and Henry David Thoreau and considered becoming a naturalist. He attended the Cleveland School of Art in 1912 and concentrated on design and illustration, studying with Henry Keller, Frank Wilcox, and William Eastman. He entered the National Academy of Design but, frustrated with formal art training, withdrew after one day of classes. He returned to Salem and produced some of his most imaginative paintings of nature. In 1918 he was drafted into the army and served with the camouflage design corps at Camp Jackson, South Carolina.
When Burchfield returned from the service in 1919, he focused on human subjects, painting vignettes of local life in Salem and industrial scenes of nearby towns. In 1921 he accepted a position as assistant designer at the M. H. Birge & Sons Company, a wallpaper manufacturer in Buffalo, New York. The move to the city encouraged a new direction in his work. He began to explore urban subjects, such as Buffalo's waterfront, commercial and industrial landscapes, and working-class neighborhoods. With these depictions of urban life, critics recognized Burchfield as a forerunner of the new American Scene movement.
In 1929 Burchfield accepted representation by the Frank K. M. Rehn Gallery in New York and resigned from Birge. In the following decade, his experiments with realism reached their fullest expression, as his paintings increased in scale and developed into austere images of the American city during the Depression. At the same time, he ventured into rural areas of western New York to paint scenes of dilapidated farmhouses and drab villages. In the 1930s Burchfield received a number of exhibitions, jury elections, and awards. Despite his rapid rise in notoriety, the artist remained reclusive, choosing to reside with his family in Gardenville, New York.
In 1943, at the height of his success, Burchfield converted to Lutheranism. He wrote to his dealer that his experiments with realism had been a mere digression and that his true direction lay in the fanciful depiction of nature. Burchfield again turned his attention again to nature and revived the style of his early works. At the time, his new paintings were not well received and sales of his work dropped. Today, however, many people agree that these late expressionist works most truly represent the artist's unique vision.
