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PERMANENT COLLECTION - CHARLES BURCHFIELD
| Charles Burchfield was a lyric visionary who celebrated the American landscape with his fantastic energy. He was born in Ashtabula Harbor, Ohio in 1893. His father, a tailor, died when Charles was only five, leaving him and his mother practically penniless. This was the beginning of the hard times that were his misfortune well into his adult life. He won an art scholarship upon graduating from high school and began his formal art training at the Cleveland School (now Institute) of Art, where he responded more to design and illustration than to drawing the human figure. The training lasted four years in Cleveland and a scholarship was then arranged for him to attend the National Academy of Design in New York. He left after attending only one day there, however, feeling that teachers and schools had done all they could for him. For many years afterwards, Burchfield could only paint in the evenings or during the lunch hours of his numerous factory jobs. A painfully shy young man, Burchfield found a way to raise the gloom and loneliness he felt in life to a poetic level in his paintings. At age twenty-seven, he held his first important one-man show in New York. It was greeted with considerable critical success. Slowly his reputation as a master of watercolor grew and, in 1945, he was elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Burchfield's work as a painter probed the world of nature and spirit, often personifying the landscape. He slowly developed a vision that became more lyrical and mystical with age. He died in 1967 and is remembered as one of the most original artists of his generation. |  Sun, Drought and Corn
1961-62 watercolor on paper
40" x 27" 1992.002
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