EDWARD WILLIS REDFIELD | EARLY MORNING, GLENSIDE, PENNSYLVANIA

Private Collection (by descent; sold: Sotheby's, New York, November 29, 2006, lot 68)

Acquired by the present owner at the above sale

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, his en plein air works have become synonymous with the unsentimental individualism characteristic of early twentieth century American landscape painting. A review of a 1914 exhibition praised Redfield’s vision of his local landscape: “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. Winter has furnished him with most of his themes; his greatest successes were achieved in the presentation of atmospheric and climatic effects peculiar to this season. Most sensitively alert to the ever-changing phases of his subjects his keen eye records the differences with unerring fidelity – here, deftly suggesting the soggy wet, melting snow – there, the dry, powdery surface as it appears in zero-degree weather – again, he successfully gives the effect of heavy snowfall with thick, grey atmosphere threatening still another storm, while he often pictures the bright scintillating effect of sunlight as it flits across the snow covered fields, Mr. Redfield works almost exclusively out of doors. 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 the canvases 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 this subject with pure, vibrating and luminous color. Few artists succeed in creating such a perfect illustion 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).