Edward Willis Redfield | American Impressionist

Born on December 8, 1869, in Bridgeville, Delaware, Edward Willis Redfield spent most of his adolescence in Philadelphia. From 1881 to 1884 he attended classes at Philadelphia’s Spring Garden Institute and the Franklin Institute, where the teaching emphasized academic painting styles and technique. Redfield then studied with Henry Rolfe, a commercial painter who taught Redfield that a work of art should be done in "one go," or at one sitting, and never retouched. From 1887 to 1889 he attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where his teachers Thomas Anshutz, James Kelly, and Thomas Hovenden stressed objective and direct treatment of idealized subjects.

In 1889 Redfield spent a month in London visiting C. A. Houston and Alexander Stirling Calder before traveling to France with Robert Henri to take classes at the Académie Julian under William Adolphe Bouguereau and Tony Robert-Fleury. He matriculated at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1890. Redfield became interested in painting snow scenes, one of which was accepted by the Paris Salon of 1891. That year, while staying at the Hotel Deligant in the village of Bois-le-Rois in the forest of Fontainebleau, the artist fell in love with the innkeeper's daughter, Elise.

By August 1892, Redfield had returned to the United States for a one-man exhibition at the Doll & Richards Gallery in Boston. He painted lake scenes while summering in North Hector, New York. The following January, he returned to the Hotel Deligant to marry Elise. The couple traveled briefly to London, then settled in Glenside, Pennsylvania. After a stay at Belle Island Farm in Center Bridge, Pennsylvania, where their first child died, Redfield and his wife moved back to France. During their absence, the Pennsylvania Academy mounted an exhibition of twenty-seven of Redfield’s landscapes.

The Redfields returned to the United States to settle at Center Bridge in 1900. Redfield was among the first artists to settle in the scenic Bucks County area, and he is often identified as a leader of the New Hope group of landscape painters (which also included Daniel Garber, William Langson Lathrop, Robert Spencer and Walter Schofield). Redfield, himself, adamantly maintained his independence from the New Hope group. Today Redfield and the other artists from the region who were active between 1910 and 1930 are known as the Pennsylvania Impressionists.

Redfield continued to paint snow scenes, selecting large canvases of 40 to 56 inches across. He would stand outside in snowy weather for eight hours at a time, filling his canvas at "one go" to capture the immediacy of the scene before him with rapid strokes of thick impasto. The paintings display a vigorous realism and capture the glaring, reflective quality of snow.

In addition to painting the distinctive snow scenes, Redfield explored a variety of other landscape settings. For example, Boothbay Harbor, Maine, was Redfield's summer home after 1903. At that time seascapes and rock gardens on Monhegan Island entered his oeuvre. In 1909 Redfield spent six months in New York City capturing tonalist-type views of the rapidly growing skyline. In the late 1910s sleigh scenes and spring scenes became his specialty.

Redfield moved to Pittsburgh in 1919 to serve as juror for the Carnegie International Exhibition. His experience of that city prompted new themes in his work. For the first time, he depicted squalor and man's devastating effect on the environment. These paintings mark a clear departure from his better-known scenes of untouched natural beauty.

In the 1920s Redfield began driving to the Poconos in search of new subject matter. His later work tended to have a more linear, less painterly quality with sharply defined forms. Following his wife’s death in 1947, Redfield burned hundreds of the 1200 paintings that were in his studio, saving only those he felt were of value. In 1953 he stopped painting altogether and instead made crafts in the early American tradition, including hooked rugs, painted chests and toleware trays. He died on October 19, 1965.

Redfield’s work was always well received. In fact, it has been claimed that Redfield won more awards for his paintings than any other American artist, with the exception of John Singer Sargent. Today, paintings by Redfield can be found in the collections of the Luxembourg Museum, Paris; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan; John Herron Art Institute, Indianapolis, Indiana; Telfair Academy, Savannah, Georgia; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota; the Butler Art Institute, Youngstown, Ohio; and many other leading museums.