Edward Willis Redfield 1869 - 1965

Thomas Sovereign Gates, Villanova, Pennsylvania
By descent to the present owner

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, One Hundred and Twenty-Second Annual Exhibition, 1927, no. 252

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Pennsylvania Impressionist Edward Redfield is widely regarded as one of the pioneering members of the New Hope Circle. Famed for his vigorous and energetic renderings of the rural scenery which surrounded him, Redfield’s en plein air works have become synonymous with the unsentimental individualism characteristic of early twentieth century American landscape painting. In Point Pleasant, he renders two farmers tending their land on the banks of the Delaware River. The lush green landscape and bountiful blossoms applied with thick strokes of paint evoke the essence of springtime. The painting captures the freshness and vitality of the spring season in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, an area Redfield sourced and studied for subject matter for sixty-five years. As indicated by its title, the work was painted in Point Pleasant, north of the artist’s home at Center Bridge, where he maintained a studio.  

A review of a 1914 exhibition praised Redfield’s vision of his 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, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2004, pp. 119-20).