Daniel Garber 1880-1958

Amy and A.G.B. Steel, Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania, circa 1937 (acquired from the artist)

Alfred Steel, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (their son)

By descent to the present owners

Daniel Garber received his early artistic training at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and later at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he studied under Thomas Anshutz, William Merritt Chase and Cecelia Beaux.  Garber spent the summers of 1899 and 1900 studying with Anshutz at The Darby School, a summer program where the curriculum stressed landscape painting and encouraged students to paint the local landscape from life, working outdoors rather than in a studio.  In 1905 Garber's skill was recognized by the Pennsylvania Academy when they awarded him a scholarship to study in Europe for two years.  Upon his return to the United States, Garber settled in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where he eventually became the leader of the New Hope group.  Though he retained his Philadelphia studio, by 1915 Garber had begun to spend at least a few nights each week in the country.

According to the Artist's Record Book I, Byram Hills, Springtime was "Painted from Staunton[']s Place--Looking over in Jersey" (p. 57, lines 13-18).  Lance Humphries in his forthcoming Daniel Garber Catalogue Raisonné observes, "the entry for this work in Record Book I is unusual in that the artist included a small identification drawing of the painting.  In the landscape Garber returns to the view from the hill at Point Pleasant, Pennsylvania, depicted in his earlier From Tinicum Hill" painted in 1928.  Unlike his friend and fellow Bucks County painter Edward W. Redfield who often painted winter scenes, Garber preferred to paint the warmer seasons of spring and summer.  Byram Hills, Springtime, depicts a landscape immersed in sunlight, a profusion of white flowers blossoming on the trees and a clear blue river running through the newly green hills.  In characteristic fashion, Garber achieves a tapestry-like texture by dispersing interwoven strands of brilliant pigment in an intricately patterned and stitch-like series of brushstrokes.  Kathleen A. Foster writes, "From the 1880s, when the terminology first came into vogue, decorativeness had been a desirable quality in all the arts and a powerful word of praise, lacking the implications of superficiality that it carries today.  . . .For Garber, the term seems to have been called forth partly by his effects of color and texture.  More important, his personal compositional style created strong two-dimensional patterns, usually resulting from the use of a few favored effects.  Most frequently, . . . his landscapes divide into horizontal bands, sharply setting off foreground, middle ground (often the Delaware River) and distance.  . . . Garber counselled [sic] his students to see the landscape in planes like 'curtains,' and this is exactly the 'decorative' effect his paintings produced. . . .

"Garber's idealizing sensibility always coexisted with his realist approach, and the unique effects produced by his balance of the two impulses had been detected in his paintings from the very beginning of his career.  Commenting on one of Garber's windy landscapes of about 1904, a viewer praised its 'fidelity' and also remarked that 'Somehow it rested me more than anything else I have seen for a long time.  He seems to have a high and true concept of the beautiful.'  This search for the restful and the beautiful within the 'plain facts' of his own life motivated all of Garber's best work, and transformed his homeliest subject 'into something serene and golden.'  After seeing his one-man show at Macbeth's in 1925, a New York reviewer was stirred by Garber's 'golden age' realism.  'There is a serenity, an all's well with the world, that suggests this analogy with the Hellenic spirit.  And this is in no way to suggest that Garber is a classicist.  He is a straightforward American painter of American subjects'" (The Art of Daniel Garber, 1980, pp. 29-30).