Provenance:

Jim’s of Lambertville, Lambertville, New Jersey.

Acquired from the above, 2004.

Exhibited:

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Annual Art Exhibition, 1944, no. 9.

Princeton, New Jersey, The Gallery at Bristol-Myers Squibb, Up the River: The Pennsylvania Impressionists and Modernists, New Jersey, October 1 – November 25, 2001.

Literature:

John W. Fletcher, Edward Willis Redfield 1869-1965, An American Impressionist: His Paintings and the Man Behind the Palette, Lahaska, Pennsylvania, 1996, p. 196, no. 1058 (as Winter on the Farm).

Brian Peterson, Up the River: The Pennsylvania Impressionists and Modernists, Princeton, 2001, p. 25, illustrated.

John M. W. Fletcher, Edward Willis Redfield, An American Impressionist, 1869-1965: The Redfield Letters, Vol. II, Lahaska, Pennsylvania, 2002, p. 404, no. 305, illustrated (as Winter at the Farm).

James M. Alterman, New Hope for American Art, Lambertville, 2005, p. 446, illustrated.

Lot Note:

By the mid-1930s, Edward Redfield had spent more than three decades making the stone farmhouses, barns, and snowbound lanes of Bucks County the defining subject of Pennsylvania Impressionism. Winter on the Farm (Farbotnik Farm) is a later, yet no less assured statement of that endeavor. The farm, located in Solebury Township, belongs to the working agrarian landscape that Redfield and his New Hope-area contemporaries found just beyond their own doorsteps, and that they treated as a subject matter worthy of monumental canvases rather than as a mere backdrop. Here, the scene is built from the vernacular elements Redfield made his own: a weathered red barn, a snow-laden stone house with a single lit window, a cast-iron pump, and a farmer leading a horse through the drifts. Redfield, famously committed to finishing his large canvases outdoors in a single sustained session, renders the falling snow in a flurry of loaded, directional strokes of impasto. The tonal harmony of buff, slate, and umber is warmed by the barn's russet and the glow in the farmhouse windows, which gives the picture its quiet domestic note. Painted when Redfield was nearly 70 years old, the work shows no loss of command. The brushwork is as vigorous as in his earlier efforts, but the mood is arguably more reflective–a seasoned painter's affectionate record of a way of rural life he had chronicled, and in some sense helped to preserve, for a lifetime.

Framed: 42 x 50 x 4 in.

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