Title: Summer Benediction.

Artist: Charles E. Burchfield

Publisher: The Print Club of Cleveland. With label.
Lithograph, 1953.
Edition 260.
Signed in pencil.
Image size 12 x 9" (30.4 x 22.9 cm).

Charles Ephraim Burchfield (1893 - 1967) was an American painter, best known for his watercolor landscapes. Burchfield was born April 9, 1893, in Ashtabula Harbor, Ohio. Five years later, his family moved to Salem, Ohio, where he graduated from high school as class valedictorian in 1911. He attended the Cleveland School of Art from 1912 to 1916 and studied with Henry G. Keller, Frank N. Wilcox, and William J. Eastman.

In 1921, Burchfield moved to Buffalo, New York, to work as a designer for the prominent wallpaper company, M.H. Birge & Sons Company. The next year he married Bertha Kenreich, with whom he raised five children. Fascinated by Buffalo's streets, harbor, railroad yards, and surrounding countryside, he adopted a more realistic artistic style. Burchfield's foray into realism lasted for several years.

He became friends with Edward Hopper in 1928, after Hopper's essay on Burchfield appeared in the July issue of Arts magazine. Hopper wrote, "The work of Charles Burchfield is most decidedly founded, not on art, but on life, and the life that he knows and loves best."

Condition: Good codition save for previous tape upper and lower margins. No stains or tearing.