Charles Ephraim Burchfield (1893–1967)
867 East Fourth Street, Salem, OH 44460
330-717-0092
ABOUT
Burchfield Homestead visitors are immersed in the interior and exterior views that inspired many of Charles E. Burchfield‘s paintings. Burchfield’s fondness for the town of his youth meant that years after he moved from Salem to Buffalo, NY, this modest house and the surrounding area were subjects he revisited. Throughout his life, Burchfield added to works of art that he started in the 1910s or created new watercolor paintings based on his memories of the East Fourth Street neighborhood, Salem, and the woodlands of his youth. Inside the house, prints of Burchfield paintings are displayed near the windows with the views that the artist captured and transformed on canvas. Homestead exhibits also include family photos and other archival materials that provide insights into Burchfield’s creative process and the factors that influenced the development of his unique painting style.
SPECIAL RESOURCES
“An artist must paint not what he sees in nature, but what is there. To do so he must invent symbols, which, if properly used, make his work seem even more real than what is in front of him.”
— Charles Burchfield
Charles Ephraim Burchfield (1893–1967)
Charles Ephraim Burchfield was an extraordinarily gifted watercolor artist. Revered by peers, critics, and collectors during his lifetime, his work continues to attract admirers.
He lived with his mother and five siblings in this wood frame house in Salem, Ohio, from 1898, when he was 5 years old, until 1921, when he moved to Buffalo, N.Y., at age 28. The modest home, its working-class neighborhood, the small town of Salem, as well as the woods and farms that bordered the community, inspired the landscape paintings that Burchfield created throughout his life.
Burchfield called 1917 his golden year. During that 12-month span in Salem the combination of youthful energy, mastery of skills learned at the Cleveland School of Art, and encouragement from his family and friends provided the conditions for Burchfield to create about 400 paintings. Many of those watercolors are considered masterpieces in museum collections.
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Burchfield’s early landscapes were imbued with expressionistic light that brought forth a uniquely mystical and experiential vision of nature. After completing art school in 1916, Burchfield returned to his family’s wood-frame house with the gable front. The Homestead—then and now—fits in with the other tidy homes in the working-class neighborhood.
During this period and especially in his self-proclaimed “Golden Year” of 1917, Burchfield focused on his immediate surroundings, producing images of woodlands, pastures, and town scenes in an audacious, near-abstract style. These works demonstrate his unique ability to capture moments in time well beyond the usual scenes of previous artists.
His family, friends, and neighbors supported his painting. However, he wrote in a journal years later, that he did not discuss art with his co-workers in the office of a Salem manufacturing company. In advance of marrying Berth Kenreich in 1921, Burchfield took a job as a designer at M.H. Birge & Sons, a wallpaper company in Buffalo, New York. He had success there and considered his arts and crafts designs a vital creative outlet that expanded his artistic technique and legacy. With Bertha’s support and an art dealer’s encouragement, in 1929 Burchfield quit his job and painted watercolors full time.
Burchfield’s mid-career is defined by a more realistic style. He created 18 oil paintings in an industrial American Regionalism style, however, he distanced himself from this movement. In the early 1940s, his style shifted to a bold, expressive, palette with symbolic content. Promotional materials from this period state: “He was initially inspired to develop what he called ‘reconstructions’ or ‘two-period pictures,’ composites of smaller, early works, mainly from 1917 and 1918 [when he resided in Salem], which he enlarged with strips of paper to create grander, more complex compositions.” In this later period, Burchfield developed a visual pattern of intricate line work to express nature sounds. These paintings teeter between a portrayal of nature based on a combination of reality, fantastic imagination, and subconscious gestures.
Memories of Salem and his family’s home continued to inspire artworks. As he wrote a catalogue of the 1965 University of Arizona exhibition, Charles Burchfield: His Golden Year, 1915 was the year that ideas came to me which were to haunt me the rest of my life; ideas and visions of paintings that were far beyond my ability or knowledge to carry out and still are, after fifty years, an unfulfilled dream.”
