The Charles Rand Penney Collection of Works by Charles E. Burchfield

In 1994, collector Charles Rand Penney gave the Burchfield Penney Art Center 183 works by Charles E. Burchfield – the largest known private collection of Burchfield’s works. Dating from 1907 to 1966-67, the collection includes masterpieces such as The Moth and the Thunderclap and Solitude, and an extremely rare self-portrait. A fully illustrated exhibition catalog of the Penney Collection, with an essay by Charles C. Eldredge, Ph.D., professor of American art and culture at University of Kansas, accompanied this exhibition.
The Burchfield Penney also published a comprehensive collection catalog of all of the museum’s Burchfield works acquired from 1966 through 1994 with important data about each work and including essays by Eldredge, J. Benjamin Townsend, Ph.D., professor emeritus of English and former chair of the department of art and art history at State University of New York at Buffalo, Burchfield Penney curator Nancy Weekly; and graduate student and editor Robert M. Slammon, and the most extensive exhibition history and bibliography ever created on Burchfield.
The exhibition and catalogs were made possibleby generous grants from the Bell Fund of the Buffalo Foundation, Charles E. Burchfield Foundation, Vivian O. and Meyer P. Potamkin Foundation, Vogt Family Foundation, City of Buffalo, County of Erie, Institute of Museum Service, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Eastman Machine Company, Rita Argen Auerbach, Cecile and Steven Biltekoff, James Cary Evans Endowment, Estate of Barbara T. Meech, Eileen and Rupert Warren Charitable Trust, and others.