Charles Burchfield his Early Watercolours

Mood, Memory and the American Landscape

Based on the Museum of Modern Art, New York exhibition, April 11 to April 26, 1930

Charles Ephraim Burchfield remains one of the most distinctive American watercolourists of the twentieth century. His early watercolours, painted largely between 1916 and 1918, do not simply record small-town streets, fields, gardens, buildings and weather. They transform them into charged emotional landscapes, full of sound, movement, childhood memory and psychological intensity.

This early period was brought into sharp critical focus by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in its 1930 exhibition Charles Burchfield: Early Water Colors. Held from April 11 to April 26, 1930, the exhibition presented Burchfield’s youthful work as a surprising and original body of American modernist painting. These were not conventional landscapes. They were visual equivalents of wind, insects, bells, heat, fear, nostalgia and spiritual unease.

One question always returned to Burchfield: was he doing something valid? That uncertainty is important, because his work often resisted neat classification. He was sometimes described as a regionalist, but his best early work is more visionary than provincial. Burchfield was not merely painting a region; he was using familiar American places as the setting for inner experience.

Burchfield Before Regionalism

Burchfield has often been associated with American regionalism because of his interest in small towns, vernacular buildings, railroad yards, domestic streets and ordinary rural places. Yet his early watercolours are more visionary than documentary. They are not detached records of local scenery. They are emotional inventions built from familiar American subjects.

In the early works, Burchfield repeatedly returned to ordinary motifs: post-Civil War buildings, weeds, gardens, church towers, swamp edges, barns, insects, trees and weather. What makes these works remarkable is the way he animates them. Houses seem to listen. Trees vibrate. Heat becomes visible. Church bells appear to shake the sky. Wind becomes a force with almost monstrous presence.

This is why the term “regionalist” is too narrow. Burchfield was not simply painting a locality. He was using a locality as the stage for mood, memory and sensation. His watercolours turn the American landscape into a theatre of emotional experience.

The “Golden Year” of 1917

The year 1917 was especially important in Burchfield’s development. During this period he produced many of the watercolours that established his early reputation: works filled with restless pattern, heightened colour, dark humour, childhood memory and emotional weather. He was still close to his training at the Cleveland School of Art, where Henry G. Keller had encouraged imaginative invention rather than routine impressionistic observation.

Burchfield’s early watercolours are often described as romantic, but they are not soft or sentimental. They are disciplined compositions in which feeling is organised through line, pattern, rhythm and symbolic form. Insects, bells, heat and wind are not background details; they become the main subjects of the paintings.

The young Burchfield was especially alert to the expressive possibilities of watercolour. Transparent washes, sharp silhouettes, decorative borders, radiating marks and repeated shapes allowed him to give visual form to forces that could not normally be seen. The result is a body of work that feels both intimate and monumental.

Seeing Sound and Weather

One of the most original aspects of Burchfield’s early work is his attempt to make invisible experiences visible. He paints not only what a place looks like, but also what it feels and sounds like. In The Insect Chorus, the metallic sound of insects seems to saturate the garden. In Church Bells Ringing — Rainy Winter Night, sound becomes a visual force spreading through sky, roofs and architecture. In The Night Wind, the wind is no longer empty air but a dark, animated presence.

This gives Burchfield’s watercolours their unusual modernity. They are representational, yet they push beyond ordinary realism. Their distorted forms, vibrating lines and symbolic patterns suggest that the landscape is alive with unseen energies.

Weather is especially important. Rain, snow, wind, heat and glaring sunlight are not merely atmospheric effects. They are active forces. Burchfield gives them structure and personality. The landscape becomes an emotional weather system.

Childhood Memory and the Gothic Imagination

Many of Burchfield’s early watercolours revisit childhood states of mind. A garden, a churchyard, a hot Sunday morning or a rainy winter night becomes a remembered psychological space. The child in these works is not always comforted by nature. The natural world can be beautiful, but it can also be frightening, lonely and overwhelming.

This gives Burchfield’s art a distinctly Gothic quality. His landscapes can appear haunted, not because they contain supernatural events, but because ordinary things are charged with emotional force. A barn, a tree, a bell tower or a clump of flowers can become strange when seen through memory, fear or wonder.

Burchfield’s childhood imagery does not operate as simple nostalgia. It is more complicated than that. Childhood, in these paintings, is a heightened state of perception. The young mind hears more, fears more and imagines more. Burchfield’s achievement was to recover that intensity in adult artistic form.

Watercolour as a Modern Medium

Burchfield’s commitment to watercolour was central to his art. Rather than treating the medium as light, decorative or secondary to oil painting, he used it for intensity, structure and atmosphere. His watercolours often combine transparent washes with dense pattern, dry-brush marks, strong silhouettes and carefully organised rhythms.

The medium suited his interest in weather and sensation. Watercolour could suggest mist, rain, heat, glare and damp air, while still allowing sharp graphic invention. This combination of atmospheric delicacy and formal control is one reason his early works remain so compelling.

Watercolour also allowed Burchfield to work quickly and directly. This suited his emotional method. The paintings often feel immediate, as if the sensation of a season, a sound or a memory has been captured before it disappears.

An Original American Modernist

The 1930 MoMA exhibition helped establish the importance of Burchfield’s early work. These watercolours were made in Salem, Ohio, not in Paris or New York, and they developed largely outside the dominant European modernist currents. Although later critics have noticed possible parallels with Van Gogh, Japanese prints, Chinese painting and nineteenth-century Romanticism, Burchfield’s early style remains difficult to classify.

That independence is part of his importance. Burchfield’s early watercolours show that American modernism did not have to begin with urban abstraction or imported European styles. It could emerge from a garden, a swamp, a church bell, a summer insect chorus or a child’s memory of wind at night.

His work sits between realism and expressionism. It recognises the visible world, but it refuses to treat that world as stable or neutral. Everything in Burchfield’s early art seems alive with pressure: houses, weeds, clouds, insects, snow, windows and wind.

Later Life and Legacy

Burchfield later moved to Buffalo, where he worked as a wallpaper designer for M. H. Birge & Sons before becoming a full-time painter. His design work is significant because it sharpened his sense of pattern, repetition and decorative structure, qualities already visible in the early watercolours.

Although his later career included more realist townscapes and expansive visionary landscapes, the early watercolours of 1916–1918 remain essential to understanding him. They reveal the foundations of his mature art: the conviction that landscape is never inert, that memory changes vision, and that the natural world can be read as a field of emotional and spiritual signs.

Burchfield kept journals for much of his life, beginning in 1909 and continuing until 1965. These writings are important because they show how closely his art was tied to observation, mood and daily experience. He was a painter of places, but also of states of mind.

He died in 1967, leaving behind one of the most personal and imaginative bodies of work in American art. His early watercolours remain especially powerful because they capture the moment when a young artist discovered that a familiar landscape could be made strange, musical and emotionally alive.

Why the Early Watercolours Matter

Burchfield’s early watercolours matter because they expand what American landscape painting can be. They are not merely views of place. They are visual translations of sensation. Their subjects are rain, heat, sound, loneliness, childhood terror, memory and seasonal change. Through these works, Burchfield made the everyday American landscape strange, lyrical and psychologically alive.

Seen today, the early watercolours still feel fresh because they resist easy classification. They belong to American modernism, but not to abstraction. They belong to landscape painting, but not to simple naturalism. They belong to regional imagery, but not to provincial limitation. They are deeply local and intensely imaginative at the same time.

For design and art history, Burchfield’s early works are also valuable because they demonstrate the expressive power of pattern, rhythm and visual metaphor. They show how line and colour can suggest sound, how repeated forms can create movement, and how a familiar environment can be transformed through imaginative perception.

Sources

Museum of Modern Art. (1930). Charles Burchfield: Early Water Colors, April 11–April 26, 1930, Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Museum of Modern Art.

Schjeldahl, P. (2010). Life in a Small Town: Charles Burchfield, homebody modernist. The New Yorker.

Burchfield Penney Art Center. Collection and artist resources on Charles E. Burchfield.