Walter Wilcox Burridge (American, 1857-1913) Painting. Title - Babbling Brook. Oil on board 19th century painting. Signed lower left Walter Burridge. Measures 17 inches high, 10 inches wide. Frame measures 21 inches high, 13 inches wide. In good condition.

From Askart.com: Noted both as an early Chicago painter and as a set designer, Walter Burridge (1857-1913) was born in Brooklyn, New York. He began his pursuit of set design at an early age studying with scenic artist Harly Merry. After working in New York theaters, he moved to Chicago in 1882 and settled in suburban LaGrange. For many years, he was the scenic artist for the Chicago Grand Opera and the McVickers Theatre. Set design in Burridge's day meant turning a two-dimensional surface, generally a cloth backdrop, into a three-dimensional image. Burridge was famous for creating illusions that today would be called special effects, such as projecting images on a gauze screen. Artist Albert Sterner (1863-1946) worked with Burridge in Chicago, painting theater scenery. Burridge achieved national exposure during the World's Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago from May to October 1893, with his painted panorama of Kilauea, a Hawaiian volcano, which used electric lights to enhance the image of flowing lava. The following is an arguably overly dramatic description of the display, taken from an Exposition write up: Between the Chinese Theater and the Ferris wheel stood the cyclorama of the greatest active volcano in the northern hemisphere. In front of the pavilion was a heroic statue of Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of fire, made by Mrs. Copp, the sculptor, and under the canopy a choir of Kanak (sic) musicians sang to the public, evoking much applause. The word is pronounced Kill-away-ah, or nearly so. The great circular painting was made for a company of which the Hon. Lorin A. Thurston, Hawaiian Minister to the United States, was President. Walter W. Burridge, a painter, of Chicago, visited Hawaii and made a two-years' study of the mountain; thereafter, with a corps of assistants, he painted and built the scene, the entire expense rising to $80,000. The crater is eight hundred feet deep and three miles across. It is a lake of bubbling and thunderous lava set on the side of Mona Loa (sic), a mountain fifteen thousand feet high. The station for the spectator of the picture was a heap of lava which had exuded and solidified in the centre of the crater. A priest climbed the cliffs that rimmed the scene and chanted an invocation to Pele, and his form added to the realism of the effects. The mountain peak and the Pacific Ocean, the baleful fires of the never slumbering volcano, the mists and lava floods, all conspired to make a great picture. Burridge's volcano painting was also displayed in Boston in 1895, at the 'cyclorama' building there. Cycloramas were a distinctive method of painting 'in the grand manner' that was very popular in the Victorian 19th-century. A particularly famous cyclorama of that time was one of the Battle of Gettysburg. The website of the Boston Cyclorama building describes a cyclorama in the following way: A cyclorama is defined as a pictorial representation of the whole view from one point by an observer who in turning around looks successively to all points of the horizon. The artist supposes himself surrounded by a cylindrical surface in whose center he stands, and he projects the landscape from this position onto the cylinder. The observer stands on a platform, which might represent the flat roof of a house or the top of a hill, for example, and the space between this platform and the picture contains real objects which gradually blend into the picture itself. Burridge, after studying the Hawaiian site, represented the volcano Kilauea with all its lakes of burning lava, blowholes and fiery chasms. It was a tremendous canvas - 55 feet high and 420 feet long. The Boston Cyclorama site describes the experience of the viewer: After ascending to the observation platform through a passageway made in imitation of lava tubes, the visitor gazed upward and around him upon seething pools and lakes of fire, jagged crags, toppling masses of rock and fierce flames. The foreground melted imperceptibly into the painting, providing a very realistic scene enhanced by pyrotechnic displays, colored electric lights and other mechanical aids. The educational value of this exhibit was also appreciated: Professor Shaler of Harvard brought a hundred or more of his geological students to make the expedition to Kilauea, spending an afternoon studying the volcano formations accurately depicted in this cycloramic production. Also as a set designer, he worked on numerous plays including Arizona at the Herald Square Theatre in New York City, and The Wizard of Oz for the Chicago Grand Opera. In his more traditionally sized paintings, Burridge's subjects were often landscapes, such as his work Pastoral Landscape (c. 1894, watercolor on paperboard). Burridge exhibited his painting at the Art Institute of Chicago (1891-1905). Walter Burridge died June 25,1913, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, while on a two-month painting and sketching trip to the Grand Canyon.

Condition listed in description