Old House in the Swamp by Charles E. Burchfield enters the museum collection

This mixed media drawing is inscribed and signed by the artist in pencil under the drawing: “OLD HOUSE IN THE SWAMP – TO THE SEIGFREDS FROM THE BURCHFIELDS — – Charles E. Burchfield –” The donor, Suzanne Seigfred, is the daughter of Earl C. Seigfred, who was Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. Dr. Seigfred first corresponded with Burchfield to request the loan of a painting for an exhibition, but later urged the artist to teach two summer session courses at Ohio University in the 1950s. Dr. Seigfred and his wife Ellen enjoyed their visits and correspondence with both Charles and Bertha Burchfield, who accompanied her husband on his second teaching trip.

This is a study for, or transcription of Old House in the Swamp (1952), a larger watercolor painting in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, which was donated by Joseph H. Hirshhorn in 1966. Both the drawing and the painting are synesthetic works that convey the invisible sounds hidden in the landscape by using audiocryptograms and other calligraphic motifs. Frogs croaking and other swamp noises filter through the air from a murky swamp by a ramshackle house with a sagging roof and dislodged clapboards. Long abandoned, the house glances with pixyish window eyes to the pungent landscape where the trees and plants are animated and hidden creatures make their presence known.

Nancy Weekly
Head of Collections and the Charles Cary Rumsey Curator

Email Nancy at weeklyns@buffalostate.edu.

Nancy Weekly is the Head of Collections and the Charles Cary Rumsey Curator for the Burchfield Penney Art Center, the world’s only museum dedicated to American watercolor master Charles E. Burchfield and artists of the Buffalo Niagara region. She also serves as an adjunct lecturer in Museum Studies for the Department of History and Social Studies Education at Buffalo State College.