Charles E. Burchfield (1893-1967)

Burchfield noted that the subject of his watercolor, Country Blacksmith Shop, was located near Orchard Park on Union Road and Orchard Park Road. After seeing it briefly, he searched again for it for several months and “made a careful study of it, delighting in all its peculiarities as a portrait painter does in the study of a type,” as cited by Carl Bredemeier in “Burchfield in Wonderland, Town Tidings, April 1928. Sketched first in 1927, and completed as a painting in 1928, Country Blacksmith Shop was sold by the Montross Gallery to Edward Wales Root in 1928. He bequeathed it to the then-named Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute's Museum of Art in Utica in 1957.