American Art and Pennsylvania Impressionists Featuring the Papageorge Family Collection

Exhibited

"Twentieth Annual Exhibition of Oil Paintings and Sculpture by American Artists," The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, October 22-December 1, 1907, no. 130.
"The Fourteenth Annual Exhibition of Oil Paintings, Water Colors [sic] & Sculpture by American & Foreign Artists," Nebraska Art Association, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska, December 25, 1907-January 16, 1908; also Fine Arts Institute, Kansas City, Missouri, January 26-February 20, 1908; and Kansas Art Association, Lawrence, Kansas, March 7-April 1, 1908, no. 40.

Literature

Artist's Record Book I, p. 5, lines 7-8.
Artist's Record Book II, p. 43, lines 141.
Lance Humphries, Daniel Garber: Catalogue Raisonné, Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York, 2006, Vol. I, pp. 35-36 (discussed) and Vol. II, p. 68, P 199 (illustrated).

Note

After being awarded the prestigious Cresson Travelling Fellowship by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the spring of 1905, Daniel Garber set sail to Europe with his wife, Mary Franklin Garber. The couple first arrived in England, and travelled throughout the Old Continent until April 1907, when they returned to the United States. After some time in London, Garber travelled to Paris, but unlike most of the artists of his generation, the City of Lights left him uninspired, and the artist went on to Italy instead. The present work was executed during the artist’s five-month stay in Florence, one of the most productive periods of the artist’s European tour. Like most of the oils he executed abroad, it is of relatively small scale, thus indicative of his plein-air execution, on the spot.

It is in Italy that the artist developed a liking for fall and winter landscapes, as the bareness of the season meant the few remaining surrounding colors would be all the more richer and brighter. As he confessed to Emily Sartain in a letter, in Florence there was “plenty of color everywhere (…) the notes of appealing grays strike me very strongly.” Roof Tops is one of the earliest compositions Garber sketched in Florence. It revolves around a complementary palette of light blues and browns. As Lance Humphries notes: “the horizontality of the composition is emphasized by both the shape of the canvas and the strong row of buildings that defines the bottom of the composition.” Such frontality, stillness almost, conveys a sense of tranquility which reflects the artist’s own appeased mental state at the time. It offers a condensed vision of Florence’s centuries-old cityscape, where elegant palazzi harmoniously mix with crenellated medieval towers (Porta San Rocco?) and picturesque dovecotes. Garber focuses on the diffused winter light, which adds to the beauty of this old, quaint neighborhood. He veers away from the city’s most traditional, and expected, monuments, although one can spot the outline of the Duomo in the distance. Sheltered from the city’s opulent architectural gems, the viewer can at leisure soak in the winter sun, and meditate on what the Italian Capital of the Arts has to offer.