Snowstorm in the Woods

Charles Ephraim Burchfields Snowstorm in the Woods from 1917 is an early masterwork by an artist who would become Americas most visionary painter of landscape and weather. Painted when Burchfield was just 24 and working as a camouflage designer during World War I, the watercolor captures a forest in the grip of winter with an intensity that transcends naturalistic description. The trees contort and sway under the force of wind and snow, their branches reduced to calligraphic gestures that suggest both the physical reality of a storm and the interior experience of anxiety and awe. Burchfield began keeping journals in his youth in which he recorded not just visual observations but sounds, smells, and emotional responses to the natural world, and his paintings are attempts to synthesize all these sensations into a single image. The watercolor medium suits this ambition perfectly: the white of the paper functions as both snow and sky, while the wet-in-wet washes create the blurred, muffled quality of a world seen through falling snow. The gouache additions provide opaque accents that model tree trunks and foreground masses with a physicality that anchors the atmospheric washes. In 1917, Burchfield was already developing the visual vocabulary of animated weather that would make him unique in American art: the sense that nature is not a passive backdrop for human activity but a living, breathing, sometimes threatening presence.

Burchfields early watercolors from 1915-1918 are now considered among the most original works in the history of American art, establishing a new mode of landscape painting that expressed psychological states through weather and natural forms. Snowstorm in the Woods exhibits the full range of techniques he would refine over a fifty-year career.

An early masterwork by Burchfield that uses watercolor and gouache to transform a winter forest into a vision of animated weather, establishing the emotional landscape vocabulary that would define Americas most visionary painter of storm and season.