Artist: Charles Burchfield (American, 1893-1967)
Title: Diamonds in the Snow
Date: c.1950’s
Accession #: 50.00.01
Medium: Watercolor
Dimensions: 21 3/4 x 18 in.
Gift of: Cora Gordon Memorial Purchase
About the Artist: Born and raised in Ohio, Charles Burchfield is considered one of America’s preeminent watercolorists. He studied at the Cleveland School of Art from 1912-16, then served as a camouflage artist in the army, and later worked for most of the 1920s as a wallpaper designer in Buffalo, New York. Diamonds in the Snow is an example of the artist’s late period style (post-1943) where he returned to fantastic, emotional landscape imagery. Burchfield was known for his pantheistic portraits of nature often showing haunting qualities, where wind, trees, and light take on a life of their own. He developed a series of visual motifs to express intangibles, such as sound and heat. Weather and sunlight effects are important in all his works, and along with his friend and contemporary Edward Hopper, he is considered a founder of American Scene painting.