Winter in the Valley, Edward Willis Redfield

Link is to zoomable version on Google Art Project; original is in the Reading Public Museum. There is a downloadable version here, part of this article about a previous traveling show that featured the painting, but it seems overly saturated, I’ve color corrected that image for the images above to be closer to the museum’s version.

Edward Redfield — one of the turn of the century American painters known as the “Pennsylvania Impressionists” — was noted for his winter scenes. He often captured these on location in a single session, sometimes in extreme temperatures and winds that required him to lash his large canvas to a tree to continue painting.

Here, he presents a quiet sunlit winter’s day scene of a farmhouse in the Delaware River valley, with small communities flanking the river seen through the trees.

Redfield’s canvasses are a delight in person, their surfaces so thick with his paint strokes, you wonder how they can hold that much paint.