Charles E. Burchfield (1893-1967)

The panoramic view of sheer beauty and grandeur in the unspoiled vista of March Day at Gowanda makes the world solely Burchfield’s, the American frontier that he admired. “I would like to be the embodiment of March ― both in life & art ―,” he wrote in 1922.  Pyramidal forms repeat throughout the composition from pine groves to tree-crested knolls to diaphanous shafts of light. A single deciduous tree is shot with color. A flock of primordial crows disperses below banks of clouds. The rich greenery of pines and spruces animates the painting, giving the illusion of a community of trees hiking up the promontory, claiming it for their home, chasing snow patches into crevices in the distance. Henry David Thoreau’s reverence for trees is parallel:

Sometimes I rambled to pine groves, standing like temples, or like fleets at sea, full-rigged, with wavy boughs, and rippling with light so soft and green and shady that the Druids would have forsaken their oaks to worship in them; or to the cedar wood beyond Flint’s Pond, where the trees, covered with hoary glue berries, spiring higher and higher, are fit to stand before Valhalla…