American Masterpieces from Dryads Green Gallery (Please Scroll Down--Catalogue is Alphabetical by Artist Last Name)

Artist Name:           L. Birge Harrison    Artist Dates:            1854 - 1928     Painting Title:          Winter Fields Painting Date:          Undated   Medium:                 Oil on Canvas        Signature:                Signed Lower Left Provenance:            Private Collection Condition:               Excellent           Size Unframed:        14 1/8 x 21 1/8 Frame Condition:      Antique Artist Best Price:      $145,500 Our Price:               SOLD

Curator's Comments: Birge Harrison’s incredible "November" brought him fame and recognition as one of the first American paintings ever to be acquired directly by the French government. The time was 1882, and Lovell Birge Harrison along with his brother Thomas Alexander (both men were known by their middle names) were Philadelphians trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, who spent the closing decades of the 19th century painting in France. In 1876, Birge met Sargent in Philadelphia at the Centennial Exposition and was told to continue his studies under Sargent's own master, Carolus-Duran. Later Harrison studied with Alexandre Cabanel at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. But it was Bastien-Lepage who most influenced the brothers as they summered at Pont-Aven and Concarneau, guiding them in the plein aire direction that resulted in "November" and Alexander Harrison’s famous outdoor nude study "In Arcadia." Following his return to America, in 1905, Birge helped found the Art Students League Summer School in Woodstock, NY (where he died), and was elected to the National Academy in 1910. His lectures on Landscape Painting became a book in 1909, and it was landscape that Birge Harrison excelled in. "Winter Fields" shows the essence of his thinking, as well as his masterful technique revealed in the herringbone gleam of his pure "snow-whiteness," which is a strong reminder of Walter Launt Palmer’s irridesence. Harrison is in touch with the austerity of nature, not a sterile mood, but a sense of its monumental perfection, seen here in the etched quality of the trees and brush, and much reminiscent of "November" as Gabriele Weisberg points out in Beyond Impressionism: The Naturalist Impulse, where she speaks of that painting’s birch woods. The same icy perfection is also seen in Harrison's "Winter Twilight" of 1910. For Birge Harrison, nature was its own masterpiece, and we are finding that in “Winter Fields” his fascination is more and more becoming our own--as we continue to look deeper and deeper into this excellent painting.

Winter Twilight (1910)

November (1881)

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