Charles Burchfield 1893-1967

Mortimer Spiller (acquired directly from the artist)
ACA Galleries, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 1975

Portland, Oregon, Portland Museum of Art (on loan), 1974-1999

The present painting was executed in Burchfield's hometown of Salem, Ohio, during his Easter break from the Cleveland School of Art, several months before his graduation in 1916. Though Burchfield believed that his true career had begun the previous year, it was the "expressionist period" works from 1916-18, that Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, chose for the museum's first one man exhibition in 1930, calling them collectively "one of the most isolated and original phenomena in American art."  Yet Burchfield was not nearly as isolated as he was once thought to be.  The School and Cleveland were quite progressive for the time.  His watercolor teacher George Keller studied in Europe and was involved with the Armory Show of 1913. Arthur Wesley Dow's influential modern book on composition left its impact on the young Burchfield, as did the watercolors of two modernists William Zorach and William Sommer.
Backyard, Late Winter is one of many Salem works that include the same group of buildings that Burchfield saw from his family home. They occur in different groupings and different seasons.
John I.H. Baur writes, "Today the larger expressionist watercolors of Burchfield's maturity are probably his most famous works -- But, there have always been critics who preferred the imaginative nature fantasies and village scenes which the young artist painted in Salem..." (The Inlander, East Brunswick, New Jersey, 1982).