Daniel Garber: Figurative Work

"The Boys" by Daniel Garber

"Though figure subjects are neither as numerous nor as constant as Daniel Garber's landscapes, they earned him a large part of his reputation between 1909 and 1924, when most of them were painted. By 1905 he was known for the 'restful and poetic' quality of his figure subjects, where the lyrical mood and abstract sense of design seen in his landscapes appears sooner and with greater clarity. 

Garber inaugurated a series of paintings featuring his wife, usually dressed in a kimono, standing against a sunlit wall. In 'Gathering Grapes,' she reaches toward a leafy grapevine. In 'The Studio Wall' of 1914 she inspects a vase filled with dried weeds. The mood of both depends on the grace of May's gesture and on the play of colored light and shadow on the wall behind her. In 'Portrait of Tanis,' the Garber's 7-year-old daughter, Garber's academic training and excellence of drawing are clearly seen. His fondness also for backlit effects and distant reflected light made a tour-de-force of academic draftsmanship and Impressionist color and texture.

Reversing all the effects of the daylight series with May and Tanis, Garber turned to his male friends and students, dramatically lit by artificial light. Though in oils, 'The Boys' draws up Garber's talents as a charcoal draftsman, for it represents the style of the numerous chiaroscuro studies he undertook in the evenings. It evokes a memory of Spanish painting as in Sargent's celebrated 'El Jaleo.'

In the 1920s Garber began a fresh series of his wife and daughter seen in the parlor of their Philadelphia home. The subdued Green street interiors seem to blend the chiaroscuro of 'The Boys' with the backlighting and reflections of 'Tanis.' The relaxed family interiors of Tarbell come to mind. Garber waited another ten years before making his culminating statement on the subject of domestic tranquility. 'Mother and Son,' painted in 1933, moves away from the shadowy twenties interiors, but retains some of their silky effects of reflected light."

To be continued

(Excerpts from Daniel Garber, 1880-1958: Exhibition, June 27 - August 24, 1980, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts" by Kathleen Foster.)