Provenance:

Jim's of Lambertville, Lambertville, New Jersey.

Lote Note:

Few painters have claimed a place so completely as Edward Redfield claimed the Delaware River Valley. In Winter in New Hope, the artist turns his attention to the village center, where the fieldstone farmhouses and clapboard dwellings of the old river town cluster along a snow-covered lane. The scene is quiet, but nothing in it is static. A team of draft horses stands harnessed to a green sleigh while two men tend to its load, and a small child in a bright green cap waits beside a discarded red sled. The glimpses of habitation (a wreath hung on a doorway, a porch hung with the stuff of daily life, a lone figure moving along the fence line) give the composition a warmth that its cool palette might otherwise deny. Redfield rarely needed a grand subject. His genius lay in recognizing that a working village on an ordinary winter morning contained everything a painter required.

The painting's handling rewards close looking. Redfield, famous for completing his large canvases in a single sustained session out of doors, executes the snow in confident, buttery ribbons of white, cream, and lavender-blue, their ridges catching the light and describing every rut and drift of the roadway. Against this the leafless trees rise in a web of calligraphic strokes, their dark armatures set against a turquoise sky that lends the whole scene its crystalline chill. Raking light sets the yellow and rose facades aglow, a counterpoint of warm and cool that is the hallmark of the artist's finest winter subjects. Redfield was the most vigorous exponent of New Hope Impressionism and his snow scenes remain the benchmark by which the movement is measured. This work, with its balanced, animated composition and its fully resolved surface, captures the painter at the height of his powers and the village at its most picturesque.

Framed: 36 1/2 x 42 1/2 x 3 in.

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