Charles E. Burchfield (1893-1967)

Each of the three Lace Gables in this “old Gothic” style house in “Zoar Valley, west of Springville, N.Y.,” has a different pattern of Victorian frillwork. Sagging porch roofs, ivy engulfing the façade of the front section with its weathered, vertical clapboard, widespread lilacs, and lowering sky all suggest an advanced age of this picturesque structure and its likely history of additions. Burchfield painted it in August 1935 and returned in October to look at the house again. After he acquired it, Edward Root wrote to Burchfield on February 14, 1936, about “how greatly I admire ‘Lace Gables.’ Its many passages, its fine color, its intimate and meditative regard for its subject make it a picture which draws the mind – my mind at any rate – back to it again and again. It seems more and more significant the more one looks at it.”

In May 1939, Burchfield revisited the site and started a more expansive version of the scene when the lilacs were in full bloom. That version became Lavender and Old Lace, which was expanded and finished in 1947, and is now in the collection of The New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut.