Charles E. Burchfield (American, 1893-1967), Six O'Clock, 1936
Watercolor, 24 x 30 in.
Museum purchase with the Jennie Dickenson Buck Fund, 37.297

Charles E. Burchfield viewed himself as a romantic landscape painter. His preferred medium was watercolor, which he manipulated innovatively to create works that he felt had the solidity and monumentality of oil paintings.

He lived and worked in Salem, Ohio, and later in and around Buffalo, NY, and his subjects were the buildings and outdoor scenes that he walked past every day. His watercolors fall into three periods: from 1916 to the early 1920s, poetic evocations of nature; from the early 1920s to the early 1940s, bold, somber landscapes and urban scenes; and, after 1943 to the mid 1960s, a return to lyric expressions of nature, painted with a heightened sense of emotion. Each Burchfield work is infused with a deep personal symbolism born of the artist's emotional response to nature and his surroundings.

With Six O'Clock, the artist portrays a passerby's view into a Depression Era home on a winter's night. Through the kitchen windows, we see a common scene of a family preparing for dinner. In characteristic Burchfield style, there is a slightly ominous feeling to this calm scene with the snow piled in rhythmic peaks and a crescent moon hanging in the clear sky. It is a brooding scene of heightened silence and houses almost sagging under the weight of the snow. Burchfield's intention was to evoke human emotion through the natural elements of landscape.