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Medium: watercolor on joined paper laid down on board
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Dimensions: 40 by 29 1/2 in. (101.6 by 74.9 cm)
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Provenance: Frank K.M. Rehn Galleries, New York
Acquired by the present owner's father from the above, circa 1950s
By descent in the family to the present owner
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Notes:
Charles Burchfield's deeply emotional response to nature ? awe, fear, reverence, and devotion ? and his artistic embrace of the subject with equal fervor, created bold new expressions of the spirituality and sublimity he found in the natural world. View through the Trees, a large-scale, majestic landscape painted in 1948, exemplifies the energy and inventiveness with which he approached his subjects. Trees bore particular significance in Burchfield's vision of nature, alternately symbolizing both life and regeneration and death and decay in his works. Nannette Maciejunes writes: "Burchfield painted more trees in the course of his life than any other single element of nature. They hold the preeminent position in his visual world ... for Burchfield they are the ultimate witness to the 'only divine reality' he knew?'the unspeakable beauty of the world as it is.' Throughout his life, he saw in the light breaking through the trees 'the eye of God'" (Trees As Seen Through the Eyes of John Marin and Charles Burchfield, 1991, introduction).
In View Through the Trees, a distant rural village and rolling hills are seen through large, imposing trees. Burchfield anthropomorphizes their knotted trunks which seem to dance in a landscape where dandelions and autumnal flowers dot the foreground, enlivening the darker hues of the tree's gnarled bark. The trees are boldly contrasted with the more delicate palette of the meadow's yellow fields and intermittent patches of verdant grass. Henry Adams writes, "Burchfield seems to have identified particularly closely with trees, and they play the role for him that figures do in the work of most other artists. As one looks through Burchfield's work, it becomes apparent that he divided his trees into fairly distinct types, each of which seems to have a specific 'personality' and emotional significance" (The Paintings of Charles Burchfield: North by Midwest, 1997, p. 114).
Matthew Baigell described Burchfield's landscapes of this period as "some of the finest celebrations of landscape moods ever done by an American artist. They depended not on particular tradition or style, old or new, and they neither reflected nor activated any mythic images of American art or life. They marked, instead, one of the unique adventures in American art by an artist who, in burrowing deeper into his own soul, brought forth images that repeatedly strike chords of common recognition. He became a fantasist for the public, creating entirely personal pictures, but ones readily understandable and identifiable" (Charles Burchfield, 1976, p. 169).
