Charles E. Burchfield (1893-1967)

Sun Breaking through Winter Mists, 1949, is a study for Winter Light, Backyard, 1949-60 (also known as Winter Light)

Excerpt from Sims, Patterson. “Goldenrod in December & Winter Light, Backyard.” Charles Burchfield: A Concentration of Works from the Permanent Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1980): 26-27.

Burchfield’s view from his house at Gardenville was also the subject of Winter Light, Backyard. The corner of his studio building is seen at the left. Begun in 1949, this painting—like many of the later ones—was adjusted periodically over the years. A virtually identical half-scale study for Winter Light, Backyard, titled Sun Breaking through Winter Mists, is owned by the Yale University Art Gallery. Burchfield described the sun in the Yale picture of “a thaw-day in mid-winter” as “send[ing] its penetrating rays through the clouds and fill[ing] the whole atmosphere with a strange ‘other-world’ly light.”[24] Bathed in grisaille, the tree and yellow-flecked sunlight are conveyed in this distinctly ordinary scene with an almost religious aura and quietude. It is not so much what Burchfield sees here, but how it is observed and felt by him.

24. Quoted in Bruce Robertson, “Charles Burchfield, Sun Breaking through Winter Mists,” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin, 37 (Spring 1980), p. 23.