Charles E. Burchfield: Four Seasons In Salem

Charles E. Burchfield enjoyed painting weather events and seasonal changes as both literal and metaphorical images. This exhibition focuses on his early works done in Salem, Ohio, and affords the first public opportunity to experience Southeast Snow-Storm, lent by the Chappell family. Additional watercolor and gouache paintings from the collection will illustrate all the seasons, offering early evidence of Burchfield’s desire to have “a circular museum, large enough to house…four season transitions…” 

Essay by Nancy Weekly, Head of Collections and the Charles Cary Rumsey Curator

Say “The Four Seasons” and many people will think about Antonio Vivaldi’s four evocative concertos, “Le Quattro Stagioni/The Four Seasons.”  They appeared in 1725 as part of the twelve concertos comprising Vivaldi’s Opus 8, titled “Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’invenzione,” translated as “The Trial (or Contest) of Harmony and Invention.”  In an album recorded in 1980 by Iona Brown, violinist, and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, musicologist Lothar Hoffmann-Erbrecht explained the composer’s intention of defining the music within certain thematic parameters:

In spite of Vivaldi’s fondness for giving his concertos titles with specific associations, to intensify their effect on the listener, they cannot as a rule be called ‘programmatic;’ but, if one defines ‘programme music’ in the narrower sense of compositions which elaborate a non-musical concept by specifically musical means, then a large part of his ‘Four Seasons’ belongs to the genre.  Vivaldi himself left no room for doubt about this.  With the concertos were published four sonnets of his own composition on the four seasons; and individual sections of these were marked in the margin by letters which reappear at the corresponding parts of the score.  In his dedication of Op. 8 to Graf von Morzin, he added to these sonnets ‘an explanation of all the things portrayed in the “Seasons”.’[i]

Characteristics of the weather, wildlife, as well as activities of nymphs, goatherds, shepherds, peasants, gods, and hunters populate Vivaldi’s stanzas.   “La Primavera/Spring” opens with Nature’s jubilant resurgence: “Joyful Spring has arrived:/The birds welcome it with their happy songs:/And the brooks in the gentle breezes/Flow with a sweet murmur…”  Oppressive heat affects both the land and creatures in the opening lines of “L'Estate/Summer”: “Under the merciless summer sun/Languishes man and flock; the pine tree burns:/The cuckoo begins to sing and at once:/Join in the turtle doves and the gold-finch:”…  The abundance of harvest time is fêted in “L'Autunno/Autumn,” opening with “The peasant celebrates with song and dance/The pleasure of the rich harvest:/And full of the liquor of Bacchus:/They finish their merrymaking with a sleep:” Everyone cowers from the fierceness of “L’Inverno/Winter,” as demonstrated in the first stanzas: “Frozen and shivering in Frozen:/In the strong blasts of a terrible wind:/To run stamping one’s feet at every step:/With one’s teeth chattering through the cold:”  

Of course, Vivaldi’s music is what we truly remember, for few of us are aware of his sonnets that provide a poetic outline for what he achieves in his invigorating composition.  For nearly three centuries, people have enjoyed playing and listening to Vivaldi.  Charles Burchfield’s record collection included many recordings of Vivaldi’s concertos, sonatas, choral and collected works, including a boxed, three-record set issued by Angel Records in 1960 of “The Twelve Concertos of Opus 8/Il Cimento dell’Armonia e dell’Invenzione,” that was originally recorded 1955.  Renato Fasano conducted the Virtuosi di Roma, with soloists: Luigi Ferro, Guido Mozzato, Edmondo Malanotte, Renato Ruotolo; Franco Gulli, violin; and Renato Zanfini, oboe.  Many of Vivaldi’s descriptions of Nature’s seasonal attributes in his sonnets easily relate to observations Burchfield made, both in his journals and his paintings.

Over the centuries, many artists in temperate climates have chronicled the seasons.  For example, Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525-1569) was known for his landscapes populated by peasants and hunters that reveal their work and occasional moments of rest at different periods of the year.  Every time Burchfield viewed Bruegel’s oil on wood panel painting, The Harvesters (1565) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he enjoyed the details, textures and compositional structure, saying: “I see Bruegel’s the Harvesters as something totally new—each time greater.”[ii] 

In a similar vein, Pieter Bruegel the Younger (1564/65-1636) is attributed to painting a series of twelve landscapes symbolizing the months of the year.[iii]  Each of these depicted a long distance view from a high vantage point to the activities of townspeople tending to their crops and other business, or engaging in recreational activities, such as ice skating.  These vignettes provide a slower pace to seasonal change, still visible in the coloration and defoliation of magnificent trees.  Burchfield, too, sketched and painted the months of the year, which he imagined being shown together.  In fact, in 1961, Burchfield met with sixth grade students at Gardenville Elementary School after they had seen illustrations of twelve paintings from his 1956 Whitney Museum of American Art touring retrospective.  He stated: “Inasmuch as these were all nature themes with seasonal over-tones, I arranged them in a calendar sequence.”[iv]  Honor students wrote their impressions of the works in advance, which they read to him.  Burchfield then provided short descriptions of his inspiration and subject matter, which elicited surprisingly insightful observations.  He wrote: “The event proved to be one of the happiest and most rewarding experiences of my entire career.”[v] 

The following year, in August 1962, Burchfield sat in his studio studying recently completed paintings, “hoping to feel the impulse to paint.”  After looking at “the new Sunburst,” Orion in Winter, The White Wings of September and Sparrow Hawk Weather, he contemplated a unified series for “an exhibition with a ‘theme’ namely, the Twelve Months, with a purely ‘Nature’ point of view.” He regretted that he still had to produce images for “January, April, May, July, November and December” to complete the cycle.[vi]

Seasons were also thematic priorities for Chinese and Japanese artists to whom Burchfield was introduced in Cleveland’s School of Art and Museum of Art.  Chinese scroll paintings rendered landscapes as seemingly effortless conceptual motifs for craggy, up-thrust mountains, swirling clouds, wandering waterways, pines and craggy trees with tiny figures or animals dwarfed by the grandeur.  His most influential teacher, Henry G. Keller, gave an interesting talk on Chinese tapestries and embroideries in 1914, offering related design motifs and patterns.  A seminal moment in Burchfield’s aesthetic development occurred when he was chosen to be a guard for a Chinese art exhibition held in 1914 at the Hatch Studios and Galleries in a mansion on Euclid Avenue (known as Millionaire’s Row).  “This provided me the opportunity to examine the exhibition in every detail.  The beautiful scroll paintings were an overwhelming experience.”[vii]  He was particularly intrigued by the extension of time across the space of the composition, so he created his own “All-Day Sketches” in 1915 which traced the sunrise, weather, moonrise, and shifts of color in a single location.  This concept became one of his most important contributions to painting, culminating in his season transition paintings which he began in 1943.  For them, he often mounted small 1917 watercolors in the center of an enlarged composition that he transformed into a vision of greater complexity and resonant meaning.

Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock printmakers Ando Hiroshige (1797-1853) and Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) were Burchfield’s favorites.  Fellow classmate Frank Daniels introduced him to The Heritage of Hiroshige, a book of art and poetry, replete with laughing moon.[viii]  Hiroshige is admired for his travelogue views of Edo, Mount Fuji and sixty provinces throughout the seasons, among other works.  In 1915, Hokusai held the distinction of being one of Burchfield’s “Three great artistic men I love,” who with poet Omar Khayyham and composer Richard Wagner, he declared: “I dream often of the possibility of a friendship with them were they living!”[ix]  Hokusai is also known for his Views of Mount Fuji, as well as dynamically composed landscapes in both panoramic and detailed views, animals and birds articulating seasonal vignettes, and people in various occupations, as well as for being an expert on Chinese painting.  Both Hiroshige and Hokusai significantly influenced American and European artists in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  In fact, Hokusai’s woodcut, The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1831-1833) is one of the most universally recognized (and copied and parodied) images of our time.

One of the more unusual approaches to painting seasons was taken by Italian painter, Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593).  He imagined portrait heads as humorous conglomerations of vegetables, fruits, flowers, ivy, tree trunks, branches, and other natural materials typical of the season.  His bizarre painting, Four Seasons in One Head (c. 1589-91), was acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC in 2010.[x]  Toward the end of his career, Burchfield also condensed seasons into a single visionary painting: The Four Seasons (1949-60).  He staged the year’s seasons in a set of planes like theatrical scrims.  Winter commands the foreground with its cold, blue-shadowed snow and huge, fluffy flakes cascading gracefully from the sky.  The fiery song of a scarlet tanager from a stately evergreen heralds the coming of Spring which is also symbolized by hepaticas emerging through oak leaves and a sprightly young tree.  The sun’s warming yellow glow gently touches all the plants, bringing them back to life.  Summer is a small verdant patch of ground with wildflowers which leads to three Gothic arches formed by saplings, their tracery decorated by flocks of migrating birds.  Beyond them lies the golden field of autumn where a cicada buzzes in a leafless tree.  Above all shines a powerful, white sun.  The Four Seasons is one of Burchfield’s most ambitious transition paintings— a fantasy representing memory of time past and anticipation of the future. 

While The Four Seasons (1949-60) culminates Charles Burchfield’s allegorical ideas about the cycle of seasons evolving eternally through time, this exhibition explores some of his earliest watercolor interpretations.  He enjoyed painting weather events and seasonal changes in his own world as both literal and metaphorical images, so the works assembled here focus on views from his family’s house at 867 East 4^th Street and his neighborhood in Salem, Ohio.  Since The Four Seasons is framed by winter, we shall begin with Southeast Snow-Storm (Winter 1917). 

This is the first public opportunity to see Southeast Snow-Storm, which has been in the Chappell family collection since 1942.  It is one of many interpretations of “Mrs. Weaver’s Little House” that Burchfield felt compelled to paint.  The Weaver House is a small, one story home with a tall chimney at 855 East 4^th Street,  situated on the west side of the alley next to Burchfield’s home.  The long, low cottage has a unique look because the giant chimney seems out of proportion for the little dwelling.  Its distinctive form was the subject of numerous paintings, likely because Burchfield was sympathetic with the family.  He was only five years old when his father, William, died.  Consequently, his mother, Alice, moved from Ashtabula Harbor to her hometown of Salem with her four boys and two girls, ranging in age from sixteen to two years old.  Like his mother, Mrs. Weaver raised her sons alone.  Charles often played with the younger Weaver boys, so for him their home became a symbol of childhood hopes and fears.

In this nostalgic view from an upstairs bedroom window, the forlorn looking cottage seems to shiver while bracing from sharp needles of snow-laden wind.  The frigid temperature is accentuated by crisscrossed and vertical tree branches, forming black and red ganglia around the snow-covered roof.  Pelting sleet in diagonal slashes, scalloped edges of snow-laden wind passing the home at ground level, and snow-encrusted trees are painted with heavy white gouache on the light tan paper, giving a physical weight to the paint not unlike a thin application of real, yet permanent, snow.  Smoke wafting from the Weaver’s chimney, as well as others nearby, is colored smutty yellow and blue, cascading downwards carrying warmed wood ash in the cold air.  Burchfield’s intentional harshness was noted on an early sketch: “Give all things their own grotesque individuality.”[xi]  Yet, despite the unpleasant storm conditions outdoors, the windows reveal a hopeful atmosphere indoors.  Curtains pulled sideways make the pink-framed windows look like wistful eyes, but inside the glass pane on the left a little, green sprouting plant defies winter.  A few sketches with notations in Burchfield’s handmade album of drawings from 1917 suggest this painting’s theme.  In the first he wrote: “Old Mood / In January, the children long for spring and there begin to appear in the South windows glass jars of water with cotton at the top in which are placed wheat corn etc to sprout.”[xii]  In the second he noted: “In January people sit cozily in south windows upstairs to catch the noon sunlight – How they anticipate spring – their flowerpots –”[xiii]  While he was thrilled by haunting, wild snowstorms and blizzards, Burchfield, like all of us, endure the stark circumstances thinking ahead to spring.  In a small way, Southeast Snow-Storm could be considered the germ of his season transition painting idea.

New Moon in January, painted in 1918, features a view into the neighbor’s house on the east side of Burchfield’s home.  Since 1917, the young artist had been imposing anthropomorphic qualities on buildings to suggest their inhabitants’ personalities.  Here, shadows on lower window panes resemble eyes glancing at the crescent moon; icicles could be jagged teeth along a monstrous jaw.  Two old people hunch over a table, under a garish light that casts severe shadows from the mantle clock and other ill-defined objects.  The macabre, eerily lit interior scene complements the frozen moonlit landscape. 

Sleet Storm, from 1920, is a far more humorous winter vignette witnessed through the parlor window facing directly across East 4^th Street toward the Bryan’s House.  Mr. Bryan is braving harsh conditions to sprinkle salt on his frozen sidewalk.  With shoulders curved forward and hat pulled close to his ears, he tries to buttress himself from the piercing needles of sleet that drive at his back.  Mini icicles hang from ice-enveloped tree branches and sagging telegraph wires.  Blue window shades resemble tired eye lids, but the house itself doesn’t convey much individual character.  Legend has it that Burchfield’s dealer, John Clancy, nicknamed this painting “The Rent Collector” because he thought only such an individual would be motivated to go out in the storm.  Burchfield’s alternative title was Ice Storm, an event that those who have experienced one know, is both beautiful and dangerous. 

Mullein Stalks in Spring, painted in March 1916, finds beauty in the mundane.  Desiccated stalks of Common Mullein, which can grow up to seven feet tall, stand in the mud emerging from melted snow cover—a sure sign of spring.  Burchfield’s simple compositional design dissects the curve of a ridge into a yin-yang balance of white snow and brown earth with a delicate, lavender fringe of trees in the background.

An untitled painting from the Parisi Collection dated March 31, 1917 illustrates the fragile time just after the spring equinox, when pastel colors promise more growth to come.  Tufts of jade green grass sprout through channels of snow and exposed ground.  Brown skeleton trees are still dormant, but the distant fields, pond and horizon of trees offer a soft blue hue hinting at the chilled air in the valley.  Although there is no journal entry for this date, we know that the week before, on March 23^rd, he recorded with nearly poetic structure a series of seasonal observations:

“Cool S.W. wind — rift clouds — Objects are again elusive – a tree trunk even close
at hand seems only half-revealed –
Heavy dashing rain at noon directly from South — brilliant white light from west –
A small sapling glittering with wet, —
Trees have oily glittering roots & damp trunks –
Running gutters –
Swift moving layer clouds at dusk – Maple trees in bloom; a drenching rain high wind – layer at night heavy raw, looming wind – the sky is let loose – it is the Equinox —”[xiv] 

House in Spring (1917), owned by The Buffalo Club, has similar muted colors.  The country road view of a house backed by a line of gradually blooming trees gives no hint to the occupants’ personalities.  Instead, the blue-green shadows, coral brick foundation and chimney, blue extension roof and gold doors suggest accessibility, even friendliness.

Two delicate watercolors, Spring Silhouette and Nature’s Gothic Window, show how Burchfield began to conceive of the landscape in more abstract terms—what he called conventionalization—eliminating extraneous details to capture the essence of his subject.  In April 1916, he produced a number of important small sketches in Bedford Glens and other wooded areas near his home.  On April 2nd, 3rd, and 6th, he created vertical all-day sketches that document rain, soaring birds, sunbursts, snow or water bubbles, a kite pulled in a southerly wind pattern, and a half moon at night.  On April 3, he also created a “Conventualization of Tree just commencing to leaf” with the notation to paint “a thin veil of green thru which can be seen trunk & branches & also sky & other object[s] behind.”[xv]  Spring Silhouette, a watercolor rendition of this idea, illustrates two pleached coves of trees.  On the left a young tree has leaves, surrounded by older trees that have nascent chartreuse leaves, flanked by mature trees that are still leafless.  On the right, the opposite scenario plays out, with a leafless sapling in the center surrounded by mid-sized trees with newly sprouted spring growth and tall trees thick with green leaves.  

In Nature’s Gothic Window, the copse of cottonwood trees forms two arches that overtly mimic the tracery of church windows. A saturated turquoise ground suggests the brilliant colors of stained glass.  Like many pantheists before him, Burchfield used Christian iconography to express the spiritual presence he saw in nature, coupled with his own fantasy of idyllic woods.  On May 15, 1916, he wrote about this vision:

Stagnant evening — thunderheads loom to far east –  a wonderful hazy moonlight night —  I heard angleworms rustling in dry leaves & toad piping in the ponds —  Venus in the west is surrounded with a flow; Trees make wonderful patterns against the moonlit sky —
Moonlight night in woods – Moon shining thru such an opening as this: [Sketch of tree in gothic arch opening] which only takes up a small part of the dream forest – Forest is in three values – shot with moon rays —”[xvi]

Both Spring Silhouette and Nature’s Gothic Window capture the fleeting changes of spring, much like Robert Frost in his poem, “Nothing Gold Can Stay” (1923): 

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay.

Riotous colors and random patterns of a bountiful flower garden contrast with horizontal slats of gold clapboard and a sun-soaked lawn in Summer Garden (1916).  For this lovingly painted view of his backyard, Burchfield used a Post-Impressionist style of simple, broad brushstrokes that ignore minute details to convey patterns of color defined by light.  Sheltered by the grape arbor, he framed his view with a pair of purple shadowed trees to concentrate the visual field, thus intensify its rainbow brilliance.  He adapted Monet’s brushwork and Cezanne’s compositional strategies to merge with the landscape watercolor style he acquired at Berlin Heights with Cleveland School of Art colleagues.

The Weaver house appears again in an untitled 1917 watercolor known as Flowers in Back Alley.  This time flowers look as if they are growing before our eyes, getting taller until the row of blossoms accumulates at the base of vines that surround a window framing a silhouette portrait of Mrs. Weaver.  What a lovely animated reminiscence of a mother’s life.  As the flowers grow, their height is clearly traced in a shadow along the vertical clapboard.  One is reminded of the silhouette portrait by James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) titled, Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist’s Mother (1871) that most people call “Whistler’s Mother.”  She is seated stoically in a chair; the geometry and muted colors of the room enclose her in bold rectangles of gray, black and tan; the delicacy of her cap and handkerchief contrast with her thick, black dress, and Whistler’s framed etching, Black Lion Wharf, hangs on the wall.  What surrounds her and the poignant way she is painted reveal much about their relationship, as can be said for the affectionate quality of Burchfield’s painting of his neighbor. 

Seasons felt like they had flipped when Burchfield walked to “The Bottoms,” named for low flat marshes just below Post’s Woods in Salem.[xvii]  He noted that September 27, 1916 was “like one of the first warm days in March.  The S.W. brings the bell-ringing of a locomotive.  Even in the joy of such a season as this, I feel sad that it is no Spring –”[xviii]  For this season reversal, he painted a lone cloud floating in a vast sky over a miniature landscape, suspended in the “hot haze of a March noon.”  It was “A day of great wind & atmosphere.  The landscape is all light—sky pale whitish blue & white; Trees covered with the white of overturned leaves –”[xix]  After years of wandering through the fields, he associated the month of September with the “wideness and completeness of Nature….Sky is big & broad, fields are unending — all things cry out to the mind — ‘Expand, Expand! Grow!’ and indeed there is room for it in this wind-swept weather.  One has a desire to run aimlessly hither and thither shouting to the sky his joy & exuberance.”[xx]  This singular cloud defiantly resists merging with others stretched across the skyscape—a fitting symbol for the artist’s independent nature.    

Persistence characterizes the subject of another untitled watercolor dated November 1915.  Beautifully conceived as a textured design in blue, white and tan, this patch of ground almost camouflages a single sunburst of yellow—a dandelion flower hovers on the perimeter of the desiccated spokes of leaves as if it were orbiting a miniature spiral galaxy.   The work is reminiscent of the Northern Renaissance masterpiece, Great Piece of Turf (1503) by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528).  The exquisitely rendered watercolor and ink painting features three closed dandelion blossoms, grasses, greater plantain and other vegetation that reflect the artist’s respect for Nature.  In a similar manner, Burchfield defended the dandelion at all stages of its life cycle from the masses of people who consider it a dreaded, unconquerable weed.  In Early Spring (1966-67) he painted a field covered with yellow blossoms as if it were a velvety carpet reflecting the sun’s warmth that forces winter to retreat into the dark woods.  He kept a paperweight of a dandelion in full bloom on his desk.  Its “incredible beauty”[xxi] reflected the vastness of the cosmos in its soft white sphere, which he painted in gigantic proportions in metaphoric works such as Dandelion Seed Heads and the Moon (1961-1965).  The dandelion survives the bleakest conditions, as he noted in an “Idea Book” while thinking about the winter solstice: “I can nearly always, if I can get afield, find some Dandelions in December.  Once I found them on New Year’s Day.  I think of December as a leafless landscape, white sunlight, misty distances, & dandelions hugging the lichen-like turf.”[xxii]

And so the dandelion painting brings us back to the beginning of our season cycle.  Our Charles E. Burchfield Rotunda exhibition of watercolor and gouache paintings from the collection illustrates all the seasons, honoring an early chapter in Burchfield’s 1964 desire to have “a circular museum, large enough to house…four season transitions…”[xxiii]  The wonderful examples exhibited make clear that the idea ignited his imagination all his life.  We thank the people who donated works to our collection, as well as friends who lent paintings from their private collections to make possible a modest survey of how Burchfield’s fascination with the seasons unfolded.