Charles E. Burchfield (1893-1967)

In 1930, Charles Burchfield painted a double portrait of his daughters Martha and Catherine sitting on a log. Thirty years later, he decided that each daughter should have her own portrait, so he sliced the painting in half, remounted the original, and added paper so he could expand the landscape setting.  Martha is seated beneath a flowering dogwood tree.

 When Martha was almost five months old, she and her sister charmed their work-weary father who mused wistfully about his youthful meanders in untamed land in Ohio. He could not help but think of his little girls as if they had been there with him, hidden in the branches of nearby trees:

On my walks to & from work I often think of the old Salem days, with something of regret for the lost bottom-lands of the Little Beaver.  I miss the rattling swamp at sunset time when the birds are calling cozily, twittering as if in lazy conversations.  But I have daily reminders of these things.  My little babies sound like little birds & often make me think of the swamp noises—Mary Alice with little songs & jabberings & Martha with her cooings & rasping calls for attention.

As an adult, married and a mother of three, Martha Richter emulated her father by painting Western New York landscapes in watercolor.  Whereas her father developed a unique, complex style of painting on a large scale, Martha followed a more traditional style of transparent watercolor technique on a modest scale. Her work has occasionally been presented in context with her father’s to illustrate the relationship between creativity and generations of an artistic family. In 1968, the local Lakeview Gallery presented “3 Generations of Burchfield Artistry,” which also included work by Martha’s daughter, Peggy. (Nancy Weekly, Charles E. Burchfield: Family Tree, 2014)