Charles E. Burchfield (1893-1967)

In 1936, Fortune Magazine commissioned Burchfield to paint the railroad years at Altoona and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Its hilly landscape is also similar geographically to Steubenville, Ohio, where he made studies for End of the Day, which he completed in 1938. This sketch of a row of fatigued workers’ houses resembles the scene in the finished watercolor, in which fatigued workers trudge home. Burchfield described the scene: “At the end of a day of hard labor, the workmen plod wearily uphill in the eerie twilight of winter, and it seems to the superficial eye that they have little to come home to in those stark unpainted houses. But like the houses, they persist and will not give in, and so they attain a rugged dignity that compels our admiration.” — Nancy Weekly