EDWARD WILLIS REDFIELD 1869-1965
Laurel Run, 1916
Oil on canvas, 38 X 50" (96.52 x 127.00 cm.)
Signed, lower right
Museum purchase, 922-0-103

When Edward Redfield painted Laurel Run he was riding the crest of a wave of popularity as one of America's pre-eminent landscape painters. Both the American public and art establishment had embraced Redfield's distinctive, broadly-brushed works as individual, virile, and dynamic answers to French Impressionism. Influenced by his friend and fellow painter, Robert Henri, Redfield rejected the French Impressionist aesthetic as too perfumed and genteel for capturing the frank, rugged vitality of America. Rather, he felt that spontaneous, energetic, yet deeply- experienced, gestural interpretations of his home environment near New Hope, Pennsylvania would result in better portraits of his much-loved Delaware River Valley and, in turn, America.
Redfield, born in Delaware, moved shortly thereafter with his family to Philadelphia. As a youth, he frequently spent summers in the rural parts of the Delaware River Valley. After extensive and varied study in Philadelphia, from 1881 to 1887, Redfield gained admittance to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He graduated in 1889 and immediately sailed for Europe. In France, joined by Henri, he attended the Acad6mie Julian and matriculated in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1890. What he enjoyed most in France, however, was not the instruction or the Old Masters, but the great contemporary landscapes by Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro. After marrying the daughter of an innkeeper in the art colony of Fontainebleau, Redfield returned to live in the Philadelphia area from 1893 to 1898. From then on, except for a trip to France in 1899, he lived in Center Bridge, Pennsylvania in the Delaware River Valley.
As early as 1891, when he was in Fontainebleau, the artist was fascinated by the beauty of a landscape cloaked in snow. During his visit to Paris in 1899, he and Henri would paint views of the snow-covered city at night, using broad bruslistrokes and somber palettes punctuated with black. By 1904, Redfield had begun to use larger canvases to capture more luminous, panoramic, snow scenes of the New Hope
region. Concurrently, he had begun to use more expressive, calligraphic bruslistrokes creating the style for which he would become famous and attracting a whole group of landscape painters to this region.
Laurel Run, a stream in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, is a particularly fine example of Redfield's snow scenes. The sun-dappled winter landscape with a stream flowing rapidly through it is one of a handful of motifs in which he specialized. In this work, the artist was especially fluent in his mastery of texture. Rich, heavily-impastoed pigments spontaneously, yet eloquently, capture the delicate tracery of the wintry screen of leafless branches, trunks, and bushes, the icy wet flow of the rushing stream, and the varied bulk of the wet, fallen snow as outlined in the crisp light and further defined by the dancing blue shadows. Further interest is created through careful design. The intriguing, V-shaped composition, defined by the elbow of the rushing stream and the curve of the row of trees, enlivens the painting by breaking through its richly-painted surface to carry the viewer into the landscape. Redfield painted all of his works on site and energetically, at one go, to impart a direct spontaneity and truth to their interpretation of the surroundings. In Laurel Run, there is an intimacy which results from the artisfs familiarity with his subject and spontaneous depiction of it.
Redfield continued to paint landscapes in the Delaware River Valley until 1953. During these five decades of activity, he exhibited extensively in group and solo exhibitions and earned more medals than any other American artist except John Singer Sargent. The height of Redfield's career was certainly the period of Laurel Run. It was then that Redfield, George Bellows, and Henri were at the aesthetic vanguard of contemporary painting in America with their various forms of painterly realism. And it was then that Redfield was at the technical peak of his dexterity in handling paint.

JAMES KENY