American Art and Pennsylvania Impressionists

The 1920s marked a period of "relaxed maturity" for Daniel Garber, who gradually moved away from his large decorative compositions to focus on smaller works, which granted him a wider audience of collectors and allowed him to show a more personal and subjective side of his beloved Bucks County, where he and his family had moved in 1907. Mary Maxwell's House fits this category since, according to the Catalogue Raisonné of the artist's work, Mrs. Maxwell was a neighbor of the Garbers as her house was located across from Cuttalossa Road. The reference to a neighbor's name in the title of the painting is something Garber did often in the 1920s, which was a way to pay tribute to his new lifestyle in the countryside, thus making the painting more intimate and true, but also more exotic to New York crowds. 

The present work offers a full picture of Bucks County. Through the choice of a portrait format, which accentuates the verticals of the birch and sycamore trees, and the slightly elevated vantage point, which creates an unusual bird's eye view, the viewer is fully immersed in the landscape, enclosed in a safe space in which the milk wagon slowly making its way across the dirt path becomes the epitome of the simplest, happiest, and purest way of life. 

It appears Garber depicted the same location on several occasions, and in varying seasons, as it appears in Autumn Colors (cat. P 733) and Glen Cuttalossa (cat. P 517).