Charles E. Burchfield (1893-1967)

McCarthy, Laurette E. Swope Art Museum: Selected Works from the Collection. Terre Haute, Indiana: The Swope Art Museum, 2012, pp. 30-31.

Charles Burchfield was one of America’s greatest watercolor painters, equally famous for his enigmatic landscapes full of visionary spirit and his direct and realistic scenes of ordinary life. Living and working for most of his career in the Buffalo, New York area, where snow covers the harbors, streets and railroad yards of the city a good portion of the year, Burchfield became “one of American’s major pictorial poets of snow.”¹Old Houses in Winter is a scene near Emslie and Eagle Streets I Buffalo.² Using somber tones and a limited “achromatic” palette, Burchfield captured the essence of this cold, wet, grey day and the dreary feeling of the long northern winters. He casts “haunting shadows over forsaken houses” which seem to sag under the weight of the weather and the seemingly eternal wait for spring.³ While there is a somewhat forlorn feeling in the painting, there are some signs of life: the woman carrying the basket, the dog sniffing the lunch sign, the two crows overhead, and the footprints on the path between the houses. Also, there are bits of colors in the painting, like the pink doors and blue window trims, that may portend a sign of brighter days. The artist sometimes reworked his paintings and did so with Old Houses in Winter which, he explained, “is a double date picture started in 1929 and finished in 1941” and which he considered “a 1941 product.”⁴ Since Burchfield began the painting in1929, he must have completed it before his fall 1941 solo show at Frank K. M. Rehn Gallery, in which it was included. The painting, however, was acquired from the gallery by the Swope before the exhibition opened.

¹Kenneth L. Ames, “Of Times, Places, and Old Houses,” in The Paintings of Charles Burchfield (New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., in association with the Columbus Museum of Art, 1997), 53, no. 76, 193.

² Charles Burchfield: Catalogue of Paintings in Public and Private Collections (Utica, NY: Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, 1970), no. 941, 194.

³“Burchfield Exhibition Rated a ‘Knockout’,” The Art Digest 16 (November 1, 1941): 7, 7.

⁴Charles E. Burchfield to Francis W. Bilodeau, Swope director, May 16, 1965, Object file, Swope Art Museum.