Edward W. Redfield 1869-1965

Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Acquired by the present owner's father from the above, 1922

Road to the River, painted circa 1920, depicts the Delaware River from Point Pleasant, Pennsylvania.  In 1898, Edward W. Redfield and his young family moved to the Belle Island Farm in Center Bridge, Pennsylvania and the surrounding landscape would preoccupy the artist for the remainder of his career.  Redfield, who is widely considered the leading Pennsylvania Impressionist, was admired by contemporary critics for his distinctly American style.  A review of a 1914 exhibition praised the artist’s vision of the landscape:  “Among the men whose work is typical of our time and have done much to instill a distinctive note of nationalism in American Art Edward W. Redfield deserves a most prominent place.  An avowed realist his art is concrete and explicit, depicting with extraordinary truthfulness the aspects of nature.  Winter has furnished him with most of his themes; his greatest successes were achieved in the presentation of atmospheric and climatic effects peculiar to this season.  Most sensitively alert to the ever-changing phases of his subjects his keen eye records the differences with unerring fidelity—here, deftly suggesting the soggy wet, melting snow—there, the dry, powdery surface as it appears in zero weather—again, he successfully gives the effect of the heavy snowfall with thick, grey atmosphere threatening still another storm, while he often pictures the bright scintillating effect of sunlight as it flits across the snow covered fields, Mr. Redfield works almost exclusively out of doors.  In the Delaware valley and the Pennsylvania hill country around Center Bridge, where he lives, every inch of ground is familiar to him.  When he has selected a subject for presentation he studies it most analytically and carefully observes under which atmospheric conditions it appears to best advantage, often going a dozen times to the spot before it seems ripe to him.  The painting once begun is executed with amazing rapidity; such is the virtuousity that most of his canvasses are completed in a single sitting.  Thoroughly conversant with the principle of impressionism as discovered by the Frenchmen, he has evolved a style of his own.  He works with a full brush, and vigorously in the most direct manner possible, lays in his subject with pure, vibrating and luminous color.  Few artists succeed in creating such a perfect illusion of our of door light and sense of actuality” (‘An Exhibition of Paintings by Edward W. Redfield and a Collection of Works by European Masters, Rochester,’ New York, 1914 as quoted in Constance Kimmerle, Edward W. Redfield, Just Values and Fine Seeing, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2004, p. 117-18).