Edward Willis Redfield 1869 - 1965

Grand Central Art Galleries, New York
Private Collection, New York, 1975 (acquired from the above)
By descent to the present owners, 2011

J.M.W Fletcher, Edward Willis Redfield, An American Impressionist, His Paintings and The Man Behind the Palette, Lahaska, Pennsylvania, 1996, no. 296, p. 165 (possibly)

This work is in excellent condition. The canvas is unlined. Under UV: there is no apparent inpainting.
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The present work depicts the Delaware River from Point Pleasant, Pennsylvania. In 1898, Edward W. Redfield and his family moved to the Belle Island Farm in Center Bridge and the surrounding landscape would preoccupy the artist for the remainder of his career. A review of a 1914 exhibition praised the artist’s vision of the local landscape, stating: “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…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 virtuosity 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 out of door light and sense of actuality” (Constance Kimmerle, Edward W. Redfield, Just Values and Fine Seeing, 2004, p. 117-18).