Daniel Garber 1880 - 1958

Estate of the artist, 1958
Private Collection, Pennsylvania, 1968 (acquired from the above)
Acquired by the present owner, 2005

Doylestown, Pennsylvania, Byers' Annual Bucks Fever Art Exhibition, Bucks County in Art: 22 Renowned Bucks County Artists of Yesterday and Today, April-May 1990, no. 16

Lance Humphries, Daniel Garber: A Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 2006, vol. II, no. P735, p. 260, illustrated

This work is in very good condition. The canvas is unlined. Under UV: There is no apparent inpainting.
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Daniel Garber settled in the Bucks County region of Pennsylvania in 1907. He first visited the county seven years prior and found himself drawn to its pastoral beauty. Garber’s interest in depicting the natural elements of this area with immediacy gave him an aesthetic kinship with artists of the New Hope School such as Edward Redfield and Walter Schofield. Yet Garber consistently differentiated himself in both style and imagery from these painters. Unlike Redfield and Schofield, who often depicted the Pennsylvania landscape blanketed in snow, Garber preferred instead to paint the landscape in the more temperate seasons of spring and autumn when the “anatomy of the ground is so defined in beautifully toned planes of dead grass, exposed stone, and handsome lines of curves of the turf” (Lance Humphries, Daniel Garber: Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 2006, vol. I, pp. 142-3).

In Bright Day, March, Garber depicts the Point Pleasant area of Bucks County on a spring morning, indicated by the trees that have just started to bloom. A clear light illuminates the scene, creating strong shadows on the buildings and surrounding landscape. The painting exhibits the brilliant colors Garber utilized in the later years of his career, as the artist juxtaposes passages of bold blue, green and orange. His classic tapestry-like effect is visible in the overgrown field and foliage as he weaves together precise brushstrokes of varied, vibrant colors. The painting exhibits a horizontal format—an unusual choice for the artist—that is balanced by the vertical elements of the tree and figure standing on the porch of the house on the left.

Garber occasionally included figures in his early landscapes, but he began to give them a prominent position in his landscape after the 1930s.This shift in his aesthetic was partly engendered by the rise of the Regionalist movement that, led by painters such as Grant Wood and John Stueart Curry, gave a new context for Garber’s work. Both critics and audiences perceived an association between Garber’s depictions of his bucolic home and the Regionalist idea that “man, nature and simple things [were] the true heart and soul of America” (Humphries, p. 144). As the decade progressed, Garber often portrayed men and women performing tasks such as plowing and planting, imagery that alluded to the natural cycle of growth, decay and rebirth.