Charles E. Burchfield

Charles Ephraim Burchfield (April 9, 1893 – January 10, 1967) was an American painter and visionary artist, known for his passionate watercolors of nature scenes and townscapes. The largest collection of Burchfield's paintings, archives and journals are in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo. His paintings are in the collections of more than 109 museums in the USA and have been the subject of exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hammer Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, as well as other prominent institutions.

Life

Born in Ashtabula, Ohio, Burchfield was raised by his widowed mother in Salem, Ohio. Most of his early works were done at this house, where he lived from the ages of five to 28, and which has since been converted into a museum. While he did think of being a nature writer in high school, he eventually focused entirely on the visual aspect of his creativity, writing short descriptive pieces for the painting on the back of the mount. Stimulated by the nature descriptions of others, his preferred American writers were Thoreau and Willa Cather and later he developed a passion for reading works by Finnish writers describing nature. Later in life he acknowledged the profound effect on his own development by a teacher at the CIA, the artist Henry Keller. The following year he married Bertha Kenreich in Greenford, Ohio. In 1928 with a fifth child on the way, he approached artist-gallerist Frank Rehn to see whether he could afford to paint full-time by selling through the Rehn gallery in New York. Though the decision to leave Birge preceded the Great Depression, his work continued to sell. Jerry Saltz suggests his influences as van Gogh, Caspar David Friedrich, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, "calendar art, and Sunday painting." Like Hopper, he seemed not to have been influenced by cubism. Unlike most watercolorists, he stood at an easel. He applied his colors with a "dry brush" technique (very little water) on machine-made paper, often reworking the surface during the process or sometimes many years later.

Four of Burchfield's paintings cover author Marilynne Robinson's Gilead series.

Of his current legacy, Saltz writes that "Consciously or not, recent painters like Peter Doig, Verne Dawson, Gregory Amenoff, Kurt Lightner, and Ellen Altfest are channeling bits of Burchfield's visionary vibe." Lehigh University Art Galleries, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, Wisconsin Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, Tennessee Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, Minnesota Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, New York Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid, Spain Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC Vero Beach Museum of Art, Vero Beach, Florida Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut Wellin Museum of Art (Hamilton College), Clinton, New York Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York