Charles Burchfield's painted memories

Magazine Antiques, March, 1997 by Nannette V. Maciejunes, Norine S. Hendricks

In The Night Wind the Weaver house is at the center of what Burchfield described as "a child's memory of a wild windy night....To the child sitting cozily in his home the roar of the wind outside fills his mind full of visions of strange phantoms and monsters flying over the land."(19) Like Church Bells Ringing, this is meant to be a terrifying picture. Both paintings reveal that the artist's image of childhood was far from the mawkish memory an ordinary adult might find comforting, Burchfield never forgot that, like himself, most children relish a good fright.

Born at the close of the nineteenth century in small-town middle America, Burchfield was raised on Victorian values that extolled childhood as a special state of being. Books such as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows, The Adventures of Huckelberry Finn, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer left a lasting impression on the artist. In fact he reread Alice's Adventures in Wonderland a number of times as an adult.(20) Reflecting on his own beliefs about childhood, Burchfield wrote in his journal in 1939:

I have mentioned before my opinion that the ideal age of boyhood is around 11 to 13; and I recalled the various encounters I have had with boys of that age and of how they won me over completely by their radiant spirit of innocence, frankness, and sturdiness....It is as if in a boy, who stands midway between childhood, and adolescence, is embodied the best and purest traits of the human spirit.(21)

Like many other early twentieth-century artists Burchfield believed that children, because of their innocence and their freedom from the constrictions of the adult mind, have a privileged connection to a pure imaginative state.(22) Indeed, belief in the importance of children's art work was so strong in both America and Europe that artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Pablo Picasso were collecting, studying, and copying it, and important galleries such as Alfred Stieglitz's 291 in New York City devoted entire exhibitions to children's art. Many of these artists were also interested in the memories and experiences from their own childhoods. For example, Kandinsky, like Burchfield, considered his boyhood home, Moscow, to be a fundamental source of his creative inspiration.(23)

Renowned by 1943 primarily as a painter of the American scene, Burchfield decided to recapture the imaginative and romantic outlook that characterized his early watercolors. To revive the spirit of fantasy in himself he took unfinished early watercolors and reworked and enlarged them to create entirely new paintings, known today as his reconstructions. In Night of the Equinox [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE VII OMITTED] Burchfield revives on a monumental scale the subject of a stormy night outside the window of his childhood bedroom. As in The Night Wind, he imagined viewing the scene from the comfort of his bed. He recollected:

One of the most exciting weather events of the whole year was what we called the spring equinoctial storm....It seemed as if terrific forces were abroad in the land. It was delightful, lying there in bed with a sense of cozy security, to imagine that outside fearful monsters were at war with each other.(24)