Father Loss, Mother Love, & Family Fidelity

Family ties were always important to Charles Ephraim Burchfield. According to autobiographical manuscripts, he was only four years old when his father William died in 1897, and his mother, Alice, moved with her six children from Ashtabula Harbor, Ohio to her birthplace of Salem to restart their lives. James, Frances, Louise, Joseph, Charles, and Fred ranged in age from fifteen to one. James, as the oldest, immediately filled the patriarchal role, found work as a core molder at the W. H. Mullins Company, and became the principle wage earner to support the family. Charles recounted that when they moved to Salem, “Mother…had relatives (three sisters and two brothers, who helped her in her struggle, which was difficult for we were practically penniless).” He also credited Jim because, “It was thru his efforts that the family was kept together, and not split up among relatives.”[i] Alice’s brothers, Samuel and James Murphy, initially found a “little brick house” for them, and a short time later they moved to a small clapboard house at 214 East Fourth Street. (They made renovations and expanded the house in 1910. In the 1920s, Salem renumbered the city streets and the address of their same house changed to 867 East Fourth Street.)

So little information about Burchfield’s father has been preserved, and what filtered down offers a contradiction in dates. William Charles Burchfield (July 11, 1860 – September 7, 1898) was a merchant tailor. He married Alice Thomas Murphy (October 21, 1860 - June 23, 1933), who was a school teacher, and they lived briefly in Sharon, Pennsylvania, where their first son James was born in 1882. They moved to Akron, Ohio where Frances was born in 1886 and Louise in 1888. Son Joseph was born in Youngstown, Ohio in 1890. Charles and Fred were born in Ashtabula Harbor, Ohio in 1893 and 1896, respectively. The discrepancy exists between several documents in which Burchfield claimed he was four years old when his father died and his father’s obituary notice which dates his death in 1898, when Charles was five. Might there have been marital problems that forced Alice to move her family prematurely without her husband? Some family conjecture suggested alcohol may have played a part. Another factor may have been William’s father, James Reade Burchfield (1834-1896), who was a clothing merchant who became a Methodist evangelist in Crawford County, Pennsylvania and northeastern Ohio. He married Elizabeth Keir (1836-1887) and they had five children, including William. After Elizabeth died, James married a woman named May and they had a son, John Russell Burchfield, who was born in 1896. Charles learned that his grandfather’s extreme evangelism turned his father to atheism, which he believed contributed to his own religious skepticism.

About his missing father, Charles proclaimed in “Biographical Notes Re: Childhood and Youth,” that he felt better off without him.

Fathers —

I never envied other boys their fathers — The only time they ever seemed to take any notice of their boys was when the play was at its height they would suddenly appear and shout – “Arthur, come in to dinner & be quick about it.

Ogres –

Another circumstance that made the loss of a father entirely bearable — I had a Big Brother.[ii]

Equating fathers and ogres is startling, but understandable when you learn that Charles’ single memory of his father is couched in violence: “The only memory I have of my father was the occasion when he spanked me for trying to snitch some fruit from the dining-table at suppertime –”[iii]

There were no memories of reading bedtime stories, playing games, walking to the harbor, or any of the other activities one would expect a father and son to experience together. How sad. Yet, I have always thought that despite his dismissal of needing a father, Charles mourned his father’s death. It took form in his solitary wanderings in the woods near his Salem home, imagining treacherous lynxes lurking in deep, black shadows and terrifying sounds. Through his art, his creation of sinister Conventions for Abstract Thoughts in 1917 and early depictions of “childhood fears” and raging storms with monstrous shapes in the sky suggest hidden anxiety about being left unprotected in an unpredictable, perilous world.

Compensation centered on the loving care he received from his mother, and the admirable responsibility of his brother James, who was eleven years his elder. In 1962, Charles even had a revised, sympathetic memory of his grandfather, who died in 1896, writing:

Sometimes I can’t help but wonder what it would have been like to have known a father and a grandfather – I could not have been much older than 3 or 4 the last time I saw my father; and as for my grandfather, I remember him as a white haired—and— bearded old man, who lived out the years I knew him, as an almost helpless invalid with a brain concussion caused by being hit by a base-ball.

However, after all, what one has in life, if it is all right, seems the proper thing — I had a dependable Big Brother, Jim, and a wonderful mother who made us forget we were fatherless. In fact the fathers of most of the boys I played with made me feel I was lucky not to have one.[iv]

So Mother became the pillar of parental love. She and the extended Murphy family provided the kind of security that the Burchfield children needed. Alice’s father, Ephraim Murphy (1818-1898), was “a farmer who was a descendent of a long line of farmers.” He married three times and had twelve children, Alice being second from the last, born to his second wife, Amy Moore (1820-1868). Her great-grandfather Owen Murphy (1744-1825), was a farmer and reportedly served as Captain in the American Revolution. Her grandfather, John Murphy, was a Colonel during the Civil War. Anna Snyder was Alice’s stepmother, the third wife of Ephraim Murphy. For his 1917 painting Garden of Memories, and its study, Crabbed Old Age, Burchfield wrote in his Painting Index that it featured an “imaginary” subject, but the figure was “suggested by Grandma Snyder who lived with her daughter Mrs. Ida Carlisle, across the street from us.” Years earlier, she lived in four miles southeast in a country home in Teegarden. Another watercolor, Portrait of My Aunt Emily, dated September 22-26, 1917, portrays Alice’s half-sister, the first-born of Ephraim Murphy in 1839.

Burchfield’s mother posed for a painting that clearly is more an exercise in creating a mood—the gloom of winter—than an attempt at true portraiture. Referring to Portrait Study (Posed for by My Mother), also known as My Mother Seated in Darkened Room and Figure in a Darkened Room, the artist said, ““My mother was always a willing model. The results were never flattering to her, but in no case was I really aiming at a portrait.”[v] Instead he painted an exaggerated angle of the shadows cast by gas lamps, his mother’s oddly orange hands (suggesting she might be wearing gloves to stave off the cold), and the bleak landscape viewable through a sliver of window not shielded by the shade. In a different view, Portrait Study in a Doorway, also painted in January 1917, Mother is seated between the front and middle rooms, wearing a white dress. The grain in the wooden entryway has hieroglyphic markings, some like his convention for Morbid Brooding, but the wild wallpaper draws your immediate attention. White star-like dots surrounded by pink and yellow suggest a repetitive pattern on the walls; however, the staggering scale of white violets across the top establishes a discomfiting mood. They might signify the six children whose presence has been absorbed by the house, raised there by this angelic woman for the past twenty years.

Alice never remarried. She always supported her son’s artistic ambitions; even having a skylight installed in his bedroom to help him draw and paint. Half-way through art school Charles wrote:

The artist in me is growing stronger. I can see that my diary is to become but a refuge for my thoughts. I have a desire to paint clouds, wind & lightning and the wonderful rhythms I see in nature. In all these their grand dignity impresses me first. Therefore I must make my life & character sublime. A small nature never sees the mountaintop much less climb it.

Last night when I was finished with making a sketch of petunias, I remark[ed] to Mother that I was wearied of it, & she wondered why. I said I did not like to draw such things. She asked me what I did like. I said I did not know, fearing to say what was at the bottom of my soul. She chided me then for not knowing what I liked and then I said I wanted to paint scenes, expecting a storm. She said, “Then you’re going to be an artist?” I said, “yes.” She said, “Here I thought you were going to be a designer,” but smiled & kissed me. A mother is always surprising you. You may think she is wonderful, but she is always doing something so unexpectedly loving & understanding that she is like nature—ever new.[vi]

Charles made periodic trips home and corresponded with his mother about special events as well as mundane topics until the tragic summer in 1933, when Charles’ sister Frances and Mother died within days of each other. He deeply mourned them both.

On the morning of June 23 at 7:30 Mother died, just nine days after Frances. Evening of fading hope had merged into a night of black despair. At four o’clock, as I sat holding her hand and wrist in which the pulse was steadily growing weaker, all the robins seemed to go mad with singing at the same moment, a little later a red-bird came, and sang from a wire out front clear and strong —

It is Sunday evening. We are standing in the cemetery by the newly disturbed ground. Some friend has arranged the flowers on both the graves, a thought that is like a pressure of a hand. The mournful church bells that used in childhood to frighten me, have died away into silence, and a soft gentle rain begins to fall.

They are gone; and even now, the vain regrets outweigh the pleasant memories.[vii]

The other woman who played such a significant role in Burchfield’s life was his Ohio sweetheart, Bertha Kenreich. Charles first met Bertha on December 3, 1917 when his mother and sisters invited her to dinner. The evening was less than perfect for the shy young man. He said, “It was a rather painful affair – Both Jim & I were bashful, so whatever conversation there was had to be supplied by Mother and “the girls” – Once they had to go to the kitchen, leaving us men alone with her – The silence that prevailed then can only be described as strong –”[viii] After service in the U.S. Army in the last months of World War I, he briefly worked on her father’s farm and she soon captured heart. On June 9, 1921 Charles wrote:

How different the world is after a man has found a woman about whom he can construct a plan of his future — A few weeks ago I wandered afield terrified by my loneliness in nature - the hills and trees and skies seemed alien - even hostile - to me, and I fled from them to get back to town where I could see and talk with people, which in turn was unsatisfactory. Now the whole earth is smiling at me; the sights and sounds of June never seemed so full of meaning; I can sit endlessly on hillsides and dream hour after hour, and not care when I get home -

And she has been there all this time and I never realized!

They married in her hometown of Greenford, Ohio on May 20, 1922 and immediately moved to an apartment at 170 Mariner Street in Buffalo, New York. Charles had started working at the M. H. Birge & Sons Company the previous fall. By November they knew they were expecting their first child. In his thoughts, Charles bubbled over with enthusiasm:

How much fuller the life of the man who has “taken unto himself a mate.” When the purpose of the union has been accomplished and a new life is on the way — is there any joy that the “free” man enjoys that can equal this? Bertha has become to me the symbol of all nature — nature pregnant with all the possibilities of new life. A man does not really love ‘till he beholds his wife at this stage and realizes that both she and himself are soon to be reproduced — the complete union resulting in a new being. The coming of Spring will be a true Spring, for with it will come the new life. Winter takes on a new meaning, for all the long months the new life will be growing & with the fulfillment of spring, be born —[ix]

On June 15, 1922 they moved to an apartment at 459 Franklin Street, where Charles could have a studio upstairs. Their first child, Mary Alice, was born May 26, 1923, followed by Martha Elizabeth on June 28, 1924. In April 1925, they moved from the city to Gardenville, part of West Seneca. Shortly afterwards, Sarah Ruth (known as Sally) was born on July 5, 1925. Catherine Esther came on New Year’s Eve in 1926, and Charles Arthur arrived on June 1, 1929, just months before Burchfield quit his wallpaper design job so he could concentrate solely on painting.

Of the two parents, Bertha, as described by her children and grandchildren, was the disciplinarian—the woman who, typical of the time—took on more of the responsibility of raising the children. At the same time, and after the children were grown and on their own, Bertha helped her husband’s career. She kept people, including the kids, from disturbing him in his studio. When he asked her opinion about a drawing or painting in progress, she always offered an honest opinion (which nearly always was encouraging and supportive.) She helped to assemble scrapbooks about his career and enjoyed trips to New York City and other places where his art was exhibited. When she didn’t accompany him, she and the children corresponded in letters that reveal a playful side to the serious artist. For as long as he lived, Charles expressed his happiness and gratitude for having such a devoted partner.

Because Burchfield tended to use symbols and to anthropomorphize his landscapes, there are very few portraits of the people who meant so much to him. Fortunately, most of those portraits reside at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, as well as an incredibly rich Burchfield Archives that reflects his childhood recollections, humorous letter-writing personality, and day-to-day events recorded in his journals. Thanks to research done by his son-in-law Robert Mustain (who married Mary Alice), the Burchfield genealogy was well researched years ago, and family members have since helped to add pertinent details. He also researched the Murphy and Kenreich families. These have been transcribed and are available as a separate document.

In the Charles E. Burchfield Rotunda, the Family Tree exhibition features some of the family members who appeared in his art. The two women who were the most important in his life—his mother and his wife—appear in paintings that do not reflect his devotion to them; they actually are more about light, shadow, and the mood of a room in winter than a reflection of their faces. Notably, we reunite portraits of Martha and Catherine who were originally painted together, sitting on a log, in 1930. A vintage photograph shows the painting at the 29th International Exhibition of Paintings held at the Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Thirty years later, Burchfield cut the dual portrait in half, remounted the original, and added paper so he could expand the landscape setting. He added landscape scenery so each daughter could have her own portrait. This is the first time the portraits will be shown together since their separation.

In Martha’s portrait, she is seated beneath a flowering dogwood tree holding a swamp rose mallow. When she was a baby almost five months old, Martha and her sister charmed their work-weary father who mused wistfully about his youthful meanders in untamed land in Ohio. He could not help but think of his little girls as if they had been there with him, hidden in the branches of nearby trees:

On my walks to & from work I often think of the old Salem days, with something of regret for the lost bottom-lands of the Little Beaver. I miss the rattling swamp at sunset time when the birds are calling cozily, twittering as if in lazy conversations. But I have daily reminders of these things. My little babies sound like little birds & often make me think of the swamp noises—Mary Alice with little songs & jabberings & Martha with her cooings & rasping calls for attention.

As an adult, married and a mother of three, Martha Burchfield Richter emulated her father by painting Western New York landscapes in watercolor. Whereas her father developed a unique, complex style of painting on a large scale, Martha followed a more traditional style of transparent watercolor technique on a modest scale. Her work has occasionally been presented in context with her father’s to illustrate the relationship between creativity and generations of an artistic family. In 1968, the local Lakeview Gallery presented “3 Generations of Burchfield Artistry,” which also included work by Martha’s daughter, Peggy.

In Catherine’s portrait, recomposed from the right side of the original, she is seated under a pink flowering tree holding a bouquet of bright yellow dandelions. In the distance stand a flowering chestnut tree and a stand of pink dogwoods. The younger sister, born Catherine Esther Burchfield on New Year’s Eve in 1926, seemed destined for art-making, having been given a name with the same initials as her father. Charles wrote to his mother, Alice Burchfield, “Little Catherine is sure a ‘peach’ – I do wish you could see her. …She is a nice armful already & I like to hold her & talk foolish to her & feel how soft she is.”[x]

In 1962, when Bertha and he visited Catherine and her family in Texas, Charles complimented her artwork, saying:

On one day, Cathie showed us the work she had been doing lately — She has made a big advance over work we had previously seen – Her work has boldness, and she seems to grasp quickly the essentials of a mood, or scene. We liked them all, and one in particular I liked so well – a mountain scene from Aspen, Colorado, that I asked if we might take it home with us, and she readily agreed. I promised to send them a “middle period” picture of mine. –[xi]

During her life’s journey, there were times when she struggled with being the daughter of a nationally famous father. Yet she emerged from under his tall shadow to be acknowledged for her independent personality and distinctive style of painting. She may have been attracted to many of the same subjects, but she painted more spontaneously with broader strokes and a keenly developed language of abstraction.

Unlike her father, who did not play any instruments, Catherine also had musical talent. Her skill as a cellist earned her a place in the Amarillo Symphony. Her ear for music is a major reason why her art is so lively and distinctive. After many years, a divorce, and residence in California, Parker returned to Buffalo in the early 1980s. Her career as a painter flourished and her work was exhibited extensively in this region and beyond. Her work attracted many collectors, including the Burchfield Penney Art Center, which owns many artworks as well as archival materials spanning her career.

Beginning in the late 1990s, Parker became interested in collaborating with other creative people. One of the first examples was “Parker Treescapes—Gallery Walk II,” a musical composition by her friend, Persis Parshall Vehar, performed by Parker’s nephew, pianist David Richter at a special reception for an exhibition of the inspirational paintings at the Buffalo Seminary in 1996. This event launched a series of collaborations with other musicians, poets, performers, and artists. Nearly every year she worked with a new troupe of harmonious partners. In addition to Vehar and Richter, she also worked with Michael Colquhoun, Bryan Eckenrode, The Freudig Singers, Susan Gagnon, Ann Goldsmith, Cristen Gregory, Jorge Guitart, Elizabeth C. H. Macmillan, Roland E. Martin, Michael Tunney, Vivian Waters, and the Unitarian Universalist Church of Buffalo Choir conducted by Barbara Wagner. In 2008, a collaboration that resulted in a book and CD that documented an exhibition and performance was “A Rose Bedside the Water” by Roland Martin. His song cycle, based on the poems of Poet Laureate Pablo Neruda, was performed by Martin, Jeffrey Porter, Cristen Gregory, Janz Castelo and Olga Karman.

Catherine also loved gardening and traveling. She painted the variety of plants and trees she observed while visiting places around the globe from the American Southwest to Europe and Papua New Guinea. All these facets of Catherine’s life and career defined the complex woman who enriched lives by bringing people together in the name of world peace and universal understanding.

After four daughters, Bertha Burchfield gave birth to a son, Charles Arthur, on June 1, 1929. As was customary at the time, his father was jubilant to have a son. Among his earliest impressions, Charles Burchfield associates his joy with the earth’s fecundity just after Summer Solstice:

Hot, humid weather—a feeling of the perpetual steaming days of half rain & sunlight & rank vegetation that are supposed to be characteristic of the early days of this planet—

I feel strongly the glory and power of full-blooded life….I think of my new son—my first boy—only three weeks old—it seems incredible he is a boy—it is just a baby—…when he, a couple minutes old, was placed in a basket just below me, he opened his eyes—and I was full of idiotic pride and exaltation because he was a boy—

Then later—when Bertha & he were brought home—and the little girls stood about in awed delight—

The dense clover back of my studio fills the air with rich odor—life is incredible.[xii]

Each of Burchfield’s children posed for a portrait during the 1930s. We did not have access to portraits of Mary Alice or Sally, but we are able to exhibit a reproduction of Arthur’s portrait that shows him reading a book—to help keep him still—while other favorite toys sit at his feet in the family’s home on Clinton Street in Gardenville, West Seneca. Father and son cherished activities done together, such as sanding frames in the studio or sharing an interest in nature, as illustrated by this account of a trip in 1935, around the time the portrait was painted:

Saturday, Arthur & I went alone to my “Trillium Woods” south-east of Hamburg. It was truly a “red-letter” day for me, and I hope for him. I had long looked forward to just such a trip as this, that I would take with my boy; from the time he was a helpless baby I thought of the time when he could tramp with me in the woods. And he measured up to my highest expectations, entering into and enjoying hugely all the little things I hoped he would.[xiii]

A photograph that was published in the Buffalo Times, Tuesday, October 25, 1938 shows of all five Burchfield children at home, smiling into the camera. (The portrait of Arthur is in the background.) In hundreds of journal entries, Charles Burchfield he wrote about experiences he shared with the family he was so happy to have. Involving them in the world of nature often provided memorable moments that were pleasurable, educational, and unified the family’s interests in the beauty of the environment in which they lived and the imaginary world of Burchfield’s paintings. This entry, dated October 13, 1938, is just one example:

The next day (Columbus Day) we felt the children ought to see the colors (tho I had already had them out the Saturday before down Cole Road, & around thru Boston & up the Big Sap Hill—… & for about five miles I allowed the children to ride hanging on the outside of the car, and have since had cold chills over it)— …in the afternoon we all went east on Clinton beyond Bowen Rd, & played around in a little wooded hollow, where the trees were at their most spectacular colors. It was an idyllic interlude, the children each doing what they wanted to do— Mary Alice & Martha strolling around arm in arm happy to be together, Arthur building a dam, Catherine gathering seeds, Sally wandering around alone, Bertha & I looking & exclaiming.

This is just a short peak at Charles Burchfield’s family tree. The Collection Study Gallery displays additional artworks, memorabilia, and some of the early 20th-century pictures of Bertha, her family, and Charles that illustrate their outings in Greenford, Ohio, including Bertha driving a car. They were printed from glass negatives found in Burchfield’s studio archives. Other photographs taken throughout their lives show their special bond. Charles had the freedom to devote his career to art-making instead of holding down a 9-to-5 job, partly because of Bertha’s encouragement. In addition to the paintings and photographs on display in the galleries, historic documents from the Charles E. Burchfield Archives including correspondence and memorabilia will be added on an ongoing basis to an on-line, virtual exhibition of linked documents for enthusiasts to explore.

—Nancy Weekly, Head of Collections and the Charles Cary Rumsey Curator, Burchfield Penney Art Center, 2014

[i] Charles E. Burchfield, “Early Life,” biographical manuscript written by Charles E. and Bertha K. Burchfield, c. 1939, Charles E. Burchfield Archives, purchased with funds from the Vogt Family Foundation, 2004, Inventory item XIII, B. 4, p. 1.

[ii] Charles E. Burchfield, “Biographical Notes Re: Childhood and Youth,” undated/circa 1955, Burchfield Penney Art Center, Charles E. Burchfield Archives, Purchased with funds from the Vogt Family Foundation in honor of Dr. Edna M. Lindemann, 2004, A2004:011.XIII.B19

[iii] Charles E. Burchfield, “Mat’l for Early Journal,” MS, undated, The Charles E. Burchfield Foundation Archives, Inv. # 55.1

[iv] Charles E. Burchfield, Journals, Vol. 60C, Aug. 31, 1962, pp. 380-381.

[v] Charles E. Burchfield, "Early Water-Colors by Charles Burchfield, 1917-1918 Period." New York: Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries, 1939.

[vi] Charles E. Burchfield, Journals, Vol. 20, Sept. 6, 1914, pp. 10-11.

[vii] Charles E. Burchfield, Journals, Vol. 38, August 7, 1933, p. 83.

[viii] Charles E. Burchfield, Journals, Volume 31, December 3, 1917, pp. 41-42.

[ix] Charles E. Burchfield, Journals, Vol. 35, Nov. 29, 1922, pp. 65-66.

[x] Charles E. Burchfield, Letter to his mother, Alice Burchfield, circa January 1927, The Charles E. Burchfield Archives, Purchased with funds from the Vogt Family Foundation in honor of Dr. Edna M. Lindemann, 2004, A2004:011.191

[xi] Charles E. Burchfield, Journals, Vol. 60b, May 24-31, 1962, pp. 243-244.

[xii] Charles E. Burchfield, Journals, Vol. 37, June 23, 1929, pp. 23-25.

[xiii] Charles E. Burchfield, Journals, Vol. 39, April 23, 1935, pp. 65-66.