CHARLES BURCHFIELD Summer Afternoon. Indelible pencil on cream wove paper, 1919. 200x287 mm;...

CHARLES BURCHFIELD
Summer Afternoon.

Indelible pencil on cream wove paper, 1919. 200x287 mm; 8x11 1/4 inches. Initialed and dated in indelible pencil, lower left recto, and annotated and titled in pencil, verso.

Accompanying this lot is a research report completed by the Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, New York.

Ex-collection private collection, New York; thence by descent to the current owner, private collection, New York.

Burchfield reflected on his use of indelible pencil is a later essay, "I do not remember how I happened to think of drawing on wet paper with an indelible pencil (although I had used it with watercolors in 1917), but here was the perfect answer—a medium requiring even more virtuosity than an etching needle. I still regret that, at that time, there were no black indelibles. I spent most of that summer (1919), which seems in retrospect a most happy one, in doing indelible pencil drawings. These were followed by a series of drawings in pen and ink with wash" (see Burchfield, Fifty Years as a Painter, Tucson, 1965, page 26).