?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 6,000 - $ 9,000
CHARLES BURCHFIELD Lacy Trees and Sunlit Clouds.
Watercolor and pencil on paper, 1916. 223x300 mm; 8 3/4x11 3/4 inches. Signed and dated in pencil, lower right recto, and dated "June 21, 1916" in pencil, verso.
Published in Trovato, Catalogue of Paintings in Private and Public Collections, 1970, number 109. With an authentication from the Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, NY, May 2014.
Burchfield (1893-1967) was born and raised in rural Ohio. As a shy boy he took refuge in nature and absorbed works by the popular Transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau and John Burroughs. Burchfield's early interest in nature never waned, and he remained first and foremost a landscape artist throughout his career. He studied at the Cleveland School of Art in 1912 and, after graduating, took a job designing wallpaper for H.M. Birge and Sons in Buffalo, New York. In 1928, Burchfield abandoned the wallpaper business to pursue fine art full time. The Montross Gallery was already exhibiting his work, but in 1929 Frank Rehn began representing the artist, a pivotal moment in his career, as Rehn made life as an artist a viable possibility for Burchfield--who was by then a father of five. Burchfield had already been exhibiting extensively since 1916, and in 1930, had the honor of the Museum of Modern Art's, New York, first one-man exhibition, with a show featuring his early watercolors.
Burchfield's oeuvre is typically divided into three periods: the first until 1929; the middle until 1950; and the final period lasting until the year or so before his death. Each period is still closely related, as he never strayed from portraying nature (peculiar to his mid-career was the rise of depicting town and industrial scenes however) and utilizing watercolor as his sole technique. Burchfield's early period, from which this and the following lot date, was extraordinarily prolific. He produced half of his entire oeuvre between 1915 and 1917 (Burchfield considered 1917 to be his "golden year"). He painted many of these early works from the direct vantage point of his home and experimented liberally with color.
