Charles E. Burchfield
1828-1890
Charles Ephraim Burchfield was an American Scene and watercolor painter. He is known for his visual commentaries on the effects of Industrialism on small town America as well as for his paintings of nature.
Burchfield was born in Ashtabula Harbor, Ohio and raised by his mother in Salem, Ohio. Most of his early works were done at his house, now converted into a museum. He graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1916.
Burchfield moved to Buffalo, New York in 1921, where he was employed as a designer at the Birge wallpaper company. In 1925, he moved to the adjacent suburb of West Seneca, spending the rest of his life in the rural neighborhood of Gardenville.
His work is usually divided into three periods. The highly original early work, from 1915 until 1919, combined an almost fauvist use of color with experiments involving the depiction of the sounds of nature mixed with personal moods.
In his middle period, from 1919 until 1943, he depicted small-town and industrial scenes that put him vaguely in the category of the American Scene or Regionalist movement, and these are the paintings most often seen in art history texts. His work is most decidedly founded, not on art, but on life, and the life that he knows and loves best.
In his late period, from 1943 until his death in 1967, he returned to the preoccupations of the early work, developing large, intense renditions of nature captured in swirling strokes, heightened colors and exaggerated forms.
