Literature

Artist's Record Book I, lines 15-17, p. 74.

Lance Humphries, Daniel Garber: Catalogue Raisonné, Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York, 2006. vol. II, cat. P 834, p. 286 (illustrated).

Note

Unlike other fellow Bucks County artists such as Edward Redfield (1869-1965), Walter Schofield (1866-1944) or Fern Coppedge (1883-1951), who often depicted the Pennsylvania landscape blanketed in the snow, Daniel Garber preferred to paint the more temperate seasons, especially spring and autumn. As expressed in 1931 during an exhibition at Macbeth Gallery in New York, the artist considered that the "earth forms are very handsome in late autumn and winter when the anatomy of the ground is so defined in beautifully tone planes of dead grass, exposed stone, and handsome lines of curves of the turf." The present work is no exception. As indicated by its title, Autumn Solebury presents the viewer with a charming hilly landscape replete with bold and colorful autumn hues. The artist depicts a moment of transition, when the verdant meadows start to turn brown and green leaves begin to turn orange. Garber bathes the scene with a soft, glowing light that soothes the eye and gives a sense of timelessness to the scenery. To achieve this effect, Garber in fact reuses a particular method of paint application that he had already fully developed in The Osprey, a canvas produced during the summer of 1922. In both works, Garber presents a "wet light," effect "by which he attempt[s] to capture the appearance of sunshine pouring down on the earth through a hazy atmosphere." Instead of depicting a landscape illuminated by an ambient light, Garber depicts the light by creating a series of vertical lines descending from the sky, similar to a colorful shower gently pouring down onto the landscape, to suggest the delicate way light would travel through air. Here the sun is out of the composition, but its hot light is diffused through long streaks of orange and purple emanating from the very top of the canvas to give shape to the landscape.

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Lot 46

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