Daniel Garber 1880 - 1958

Robert T. Moore, Pasedena, California, 1938 (acquired directly from the artist)
By descent in the family to the present owner

Los Angeles, California, Stendahl Galleries, Paintings by Daniel Garber, November 1932
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Art Club of Philadelphia, 42^nd Annual Exhibit of Oil Paintings, December 1935-January 1936, no. 80
San Diego, California, California Pacific International Exposition, Palace of Fine Arts, Official Art Exhibition, California Pacific International Exhibition, February-September 1936, no. 298
Washington, D.C., The Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Fifteenth Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Oil Paintings, March-May 1937, no. 158, illustrated
Newport, Rhode Island, Art Association of Newport, Exhibition of Contemporary Paintings and Sculpture, July 1937, no. 26
New York, Tricker Galleries, Daniel Garber: Drawings and Paintings, no. 14, illustrated
Palm Beach, Florida, Society of the Four Arts, An Exhibition of Contemporary American Painters, March 1938, no. 14

Artist's Record Book I, p. 47
Reginald Poland, Fine Art Gallery, San Diego, California, letter to Daniel Garber, January 21, 1936, artist's letter file
Marian B. D'ave, Fine Arts Gallery, San Diego, California, letter to Daniel Garber, January 28, 1936, artist's letter file
Florence Tricker, Tricker Gallery, letter to Daniel Garber, circa March-April 1938, artist's letter file
Robert T. Moore, letter to Daniel Garber, December 10, 1938, artist's letter file
Royal Cortissoz, "A Hundred Years of American Landscape," New York Herald Tribune, January 23, 1938
Lance Humphries, Daniel Garber: Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 2006, vol. II, no. P608, pp, 107, 162-63, 221, illustrated

This painting is in excellent, original condition. Under UV: there is no apparent inpainting.
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By the close of the 1920s, Daniel Garber enjoyed considerable success and recognition as one of the country's most prominent landscape painters. Although he would continue to draw his greatest inspiration from his rural Pennsylvania home, the following decade marked a period of profound stylistic change in his oeuvre, and the canvases he began to execute display a new level of sophistication in his understanding of color, light and compositional design. Painted in 1931 and presented in its original Harer frame, November is an exquisite example of this artistic maturity, showcasing the deep love for the American landscape in which he immersed himself for the entirety of his life and career.

Born in 1890 in North Manchester, Indiana, Garber received his early artistic training at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and later at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied under the esteemed instructors William Merritt Chase and Cecilia Beaux. He spent the summers of 1899 and 1900 at the Darby School of Painting in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, where the curriculum encouraged students to paint landscapes en plen air, rather than working in a studio. Observing natural life, forms and light—and recording them faithfully—consequently became central to Garber’s own aesthetic.

After returning from two years of study abroad in England, Italy and France on a fellowship from the Academy, Garber decided to settle in the Bucks County region of Pennsylvania. The artist first visited this area seven years prior in early 1900, and found himself entranced by its pastoral beauty. Garber’s interest in depicting his natural environs with painterly immediacy gave him an aesthetic kinship with fellow painters Edward Redfield, Walter Schofield and the other painters of the so-called New Hope School. He remained a fixture of the colony for the rest of his career. Yet Garber consistently differentiated himself in both style and imagery from these painters. Unlike his fellow Bucks County artists, who often depicted the Pennsylvania landscape in winter, Garber preferred to paint the more temperate seasons of spring and autumn feeling that, articulated in the catalogue for his 1931 exhibition at Macbeth Gallery in New York, the “earth forms are very handsome in late autumn and winter when the anatomy of the ground is so defined in beautifully tone planes of dead grass, exposed stone, and handsome lines of curves of the turf” (quoted in Lance Humphries, Daniel Garber: Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 2006, vol. I, pp. 142-43). Garber’s desire to explore the underlying structure of the earth’s surface increasingly directed his vision of landscape as he entered the mature phase of his career in the 1930s. Painted in 1931, November exemplifies this new aesthetic, as Garber began to produce landscapes that compellingly exhibit the Impressionist tradition disciplined by an almost classical sense of order.

November presents a luminous and painterly vision of the Bucks County landscape. The subtle effects of light and shadow are beautifully represented on the fall foliage, which Garber has rendered expressively, suggesting his firsthand observation of the scene. Indeed, the artist likely visited this location—the Tohickon creek at Pleasant Point—many times, and depicted it in at least two earlier canvases, including 1914’s, Gray Day-March (Fig. 3). The revisiting and revision of earlier works was not atypical for Garber in this period; he consistently began to create stylistic variations on existing themes and subject matter. Painted over 15 years after Gray Day-March, November unequivocally showcases the new level of sophistication Garber’s work achieved in the 1930s. While the earlier work displays a palette dominated by shades of blue and brown, in November, Garber has woven a myriad of hues into a stunningly vibrant yet harmonious palette of blue, orange, brown and lavender. He achieved this “tapestry-like” effect by dispersing interlaced strands of contrasting pigments in precise and intricate designs of widely varied brushstrokes, allowing him to brilliantly evoke the boldly diverse colors of autumnal foliage and landscape.

Although Garber applied this patterned effect throughout his career, November additionally displays a newfound presence of underlying structure and palpable solidity. November is executed with an acute level of attention to compositional design and organization, ultimately creating a flawless illusion of depth. Every visual component is deliberately included to serve a specific formal purpose. The sky blue creek in the foreground provides a point of entry for the viewer into the picture. Garber positions the bare vertical tree trunks at various points in the middle and foreground to subsequently move the viewer’s eye not only across the front of the canvas but also into the rendered space, creating a dynamic sense of rhythm. While his earlier canvases typically depict the landscape with an overriding sense of flat, decorative patterning, November expresses the sense of movement and natural patterning found within the landscape itself. As a result, Garber composes a visually stunning and architecturally complex composition that allows the viewer to almost ignore the two-dimensionality of the canvas and enter the artist’s vibrantly dynamic vision of the world.

Along with several other works painted in this period, Garber himself exhibited November seven years after its completion at his 1938 solo exhibition at the Tricker Galleries in New York, evidence of the pride he felt in this new type of work and his interest in showing it publicly. Critical reaction to his new aesthetic experiments was almost universally positive: Royal Cortissoz, among the most prolific and respected voices of the newly important field of art criticism, proclaimed Garber as among “the best draughtsman in American landscape” (quoted in Lance Humphries, Daniel Garber: Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 2006, vol. I, p. 163).