The New Hope Art Colony: Edward Willis Redfield

"Village of Carversville" by Edward Redfield

"Edward Willis Redfield was acknowledged as the central and most important figure in the Pennsylvania School of Landscape Painting because he developed a style and method of painting that became most associated with the Pennsylvania Impressionists. He was born in December 1869 in Bridgeville, Delaware. 

Redfield had determined to become an artist at an early age. When he was seven, he exhibited a drawing of a cow in a competition for school children at the Centennial Exposition in 1876. Although his father, who owned plant nurseries and sold fruit and flowers, had hoped his son would follow him in the family business, he nevertheless encouraged his son's interest in painting.

Redfield eventually hoped to be accepted into the Pennsylvania Academy, so in preparation for studying there, he received training from a commercial artist, Henry Rolfe. The young artist was given drawing paper, a drawing board, a few sticks of charcoal, and a plaster cast of Phidias' Zeus to serve as model. At the conclusion of each lesson, which lasted an hour, the sketch was complete, and Rolfe would give advice and make corrections. He suggested that a work of art should be made at 'one go' or at one sitting, taken directly from the subject, and even if incomplete, should never be retouched or redone. This was an important method of working that Redfield employed throughout his career. Almost all of his paintings were rendered at 'one go'; he made no sketches to study from but worked directly from nature."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Pennsylvania Impressionists" by Thomas Folk.)