DANIEL GARBER, Forest Entrance

University Club, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1930 (acquired directly from the artist)
Private Collection
By descent in the family to the present owner (his nephew)

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 Cecilia Beaux.  In 1905 Garber’s potential 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 in 1907, Garber and his wife settled in Lumberville, Pennsylvania, a small town just north of New Hope.  In 1909, he joined the Pennsylvania Academy as a faculty member, where he taught until his retirement in 1950.  Brian H. Peterson writes: “…it was at the Pennsylvania Academy that he found his true stylistic and temperamental home…Garber’s consummate skill as a teacher, as well as his fabulously successful career as a painter, made him the most prominent defender of the artistic tradition in a school that had built its reputation largely as a bastion of that tradition” (Thomas C. Folk, Pennsylvania Impressionism, Philadelphia, 2002, p. 9).  Garber won numerous awards and exhibited extensively in the first few decades of the twentieth century, prompting art critic Henry Pitz to write in 1928 that Garber represented “American landscape at its best”.

In Forest Entrance, painted in September of 1929, a dense stand of tall green trees stretches across the center of the composition. Kathleen A. Foster observes, “his personal compositional style created strong two-dimensional patterns. ...his landscapes divide into horizontal bands, sharply setting off (the) foreground…Garber counselled [sic] his students to see the landscape in planes like `curtains,’ (Daniel Garber, 1880-1958, 1980, pp.29-30).  While most of his contemporaries were drawn to images of the snow-covered landscapes in winter, Garber preferred the more temperate times of year. In Forest Entrance Garber has painted a view of nature in the moments just before the impending harsh winter months. He weaves a palette of rich green and autumnal pigments into an intricately patterned tapestry of stitch-like brushstrokes.  The scene excludes any sign of human presence - we are observers at a distance, sighted only by a brown fawn who feeds on the grass before the forest’s entrance.