Charles Burchfield

Burchfield is a landscape painter who is unique among the major American modernists for working almost exclusively in watercolor. Drawing his surroundings--especially in the towns of Ohio and New York where he lived--he captured not only the houses, gardens, and trees but also the energy and mood of the world around him. In 1930 his work was the subject of the Museum of Modern Art's first one-person exhibition. While Burchfield is better known today for the visionary style of his later watercolors, the present sheet is typical of the more realist approach he embraced in the 1930s, and for which he is sometimes associated with the American Regionalist movement.