?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
CHARLES BURCHFIELD Mary Alice (Preliminary Study).
Pencil on wove paper, circa 1930. 355x254 mm; 14x10 inches. Annotated in pencil, upper right and lower center recto.
Provenance: Raydon Gallery, New York; private collection, Chicago.
A portrait study of Burchfield's (1893-1967) daughter Mary Alice, who was born in Buffalo in 1923, lived in Chicago and upstate New York, and died in 1988 in Los Angeles. This appears to be a preliminary study for Burchfield's Portrait Study in Spring Landscape, watercolor, charcoal and pencil on paper, 1930-60, now in the Burchfield Penney Art Center at Buffalo State College. The watercolor shows the artist's daughter, seated on a log and holding a flower, in a verdant spring landscape. Around her head is a golden aura, which is called for in the artist's pencil notes on the current drawing.
Burchfield's (1893-1967) works transcend the Regionalist label that is often applied to the artist. He both a realist and abstractionist. Though he strived to create a strong sense of human emotion and thought in his works, he often did not simply document the reality of his surroundings (he lived most of his life in small towns). Like William Zorach and Emil Bisttram, Burchfield saw nature as being endowed with mystical and mysterious qualities, which he communicated in his works.
Burchfield was born in Ashtabula Harbor, Ohio and attended the Cleveland School of Art from 1912 to 1916. He began his career in Buffalo, New York working as a wallpaper designer for M. H. Birge & Sons Company. It was during this time period that Burchfield's work was more rooted in suburban realism. Burchfield and Edward Hopper began their friendship in 1928, after Hopper wrote favorably of Burchfield's work in Arts magazine (Burchfield in turn, wrote an essay for Hopper's 1933 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York). Hopper wrote that Burchfield, "Has extracted a quality that we may call poetic, romantic, lyric . . . By sympathy with the particular he had made it epic and universal." Like Hopper, Burchfield was able to stop working commercially and focus on painting full time after finding gallery representation. In 1929, Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries in New York, the same gallery that represented Hopper, began showing Burchfield's works. Through the 1930s, Burchfield was the recipient of international recognition; Life magazine declared him one of America's greatest painters in December 1936. In the 1940s, Burchfield's works became more spiritual, transcendental and based in nature.
