DANIEL GARBER, In the Springtime

Daniel Garber spent the majority of his life in Pennsylvania, both as a teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy for the Fine Arts and a noted painter of the region. Settling in Lumberville, Pennsylvania, Garber’s subjects became the people, quarries, and woods of his local surroundings in Bucks County as well as the area around Lambertville, New Jersey across the Delaware River. Garber often noted the locations of his compositions in his record books and his entry for In the Springtime Garber reads: “Painted from Lower Road from Lambertville to Princeton. Looking Toward the East in the Morning.” In his catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work, Lance Humphries notes: “The entry for In the Springtime is the penultimate one made by the artist in the artist’s record … the painting In the Springtime is the artist’s last signed and dated landscape” (Daniel Garber: Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 2006, p. 291).

Early in his artistic career, Garber spent two years in Europe where he developed a brighter palette and began to use a short staccato brushstroke. While Garber was certainly influenced by the Impressionists during these years of study, he ultimately maintained a more “academic” style of drawing and composition. Garber explored different compositional formats in the late '20s which he would continue to alter in his late work. He devised an open view of the land by pulling the horizon line up towards the top of the painting thereby allowing an expansive foreground of landscape below. Garber uses this wide view in In the Springtime, 1954 and includes elements which underscore the narrative of his subject and his kinship to the Regionalist painters Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton. A classic scene of American rural life, a lone farmer stands in his field proudly surveying his crop, his small figure juxtaposed against the wide open landscape of houses, barns, trees and the fields that surround him. A raking light highlights the back of his white shirt, throws shadows across a barn and plays off the reddish brown houses and yellow-green trees on the hills. Placed in the rear center of the scene, a farmer’s wife hanging her laundry to dry is barely visible. The two figures are tiny in relation to the scale of the whole, stitched into the texture of the painting like the small short brushstrokes used to paint the hills and trees around them. As Thomas Folk notes, “At the end of his career, Garber continued to employ the scintillating color of his earlier work. Garber continued to paint until his death in 1958. He never lost his skill or draftsmanship, and his last paintings are as sparkling as paintings completed forty years before" (The Pennsylvania Impressionists, Madison, Wisconsin, 1997, p.76).