Charles Burchfield

(American, 1893–1967)

Charles Burchfield was an American artist whose watercolor depictions of nature seem to hum with light and movement. Often focusing on scenes in his immediate surroundings—neighbors’ homes, wintry forests, and blooming wildflowers—Burchfield developed a unique stylization of form while maintaining a perceptive sense of weather and light. “It seems at times I should be a composer of sounds, not only of rhythms and colors,” he once remarked. “Walking under the trees, I felt as if the color made sound.” Born Charles Ephraim Burchfield in Ashtabula Harbor, OH on April 9, 1893, he studied at the Cleveland School of Art and later supported himself as a wallpaper designer for M.H. Birge & Sons Company in Buffalo, NY. While living in the town of West Seneca a suburb of Buffalo, he painted the surrounding landscape and industrial scenes, motifs similar to those of his friend the painter Edward Hopper. In 1930, the artist was the subject a solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, “Charles Burchfield: Early Watercolors 1916–18,” and in December 1936, Life magazine anointed him as one of America’s 10 greatest painters. During the 1940s, the artist created his most hallucinatory works, including the mystical Four Seasons (1949-1960), which with its exaggerated cathedral-like forms, depicts the seasonal transition of a forest over a calendar year. A month before his death on January 11, 1967 in West Seneca, NY, Buffalo State College honored his work by creating the Charles E. Burchfield Center. It holds the largest public collection of his works, over 70 volumes of his journals, and a scale re-creation of his studio. His works are also held in the collections of the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, among others.