Series: A Masterpiece Comes Home

Charles Burchfield’s ‘Retreat of Winter’ at The Burchfield Penney Art Center

Author’s Note: This was originally published yesterday, August 22, 2024, in The Buffalo Hive, where I serve as Managing Editor.

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, – no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature” (Essay, 1836).

If you wish to understand Charles Burchfield’s work, especially his masterpiece “Retreat of Winter,” you need to go back 100 years when the tender, green sprouts of American Transcendentalism sprang from the dry, frozen ground. 

Transcendentalism was a literary and artistic movement that resisted the early 19th Century’s intellectual method of engaging with the world. The Transcen…