EDWARD WILLIS REDFIELD | LINEKIN BAY

The artist

Estate of the above

Newman Galleries, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Private collection (sold: Sotheby's, New York, December 4, 1986, lot 221)

Private collection (acquired at the above sale)

Sold: Christie's, New York, November 30, 1999, lot 76

Acquired by the present owner at the above sale

Henry C. Pitz, "Edward Redfield, Painter of Place and Time," American Artist, April 1959, p. 28, illustrated

J.M.W. Fletcher, Edward Willis Redfield, 1869-1965 An American Impressionist: His Paintings and the Man Behind the Palette, Lahaska, Pennsylvania, 1996, no. 107, p. 141 (as Limekin Bay); p. 149 (as Linniken Bay); no. 372, p. 168 [as Linikin Bay, Maine (Dancing Boats)]

J.M.W. Fletcher, Edward Willis Redfield, 1869-1965 An American Impressionist: The Redfield Letters, vol. 2, Lahaska, Pennsylvania, 2002, pp. 457, 484, illustrated no. 198, p. 395 (as Linikin Bay, Maine)

Constance Kimmerle, Edward W. Redfield: Just Values and Fine Seeing, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2004, pp. 44, 45, 51, 113, illustrated fig. 40, p. 44

New York, National Academy of Design, 123rd Annual Exhibition, March-April 1949, no. 67 (as Linnekin Bay)

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Newman Galleries, Edward W. Redfield, A Retrospective Exhibition of His Work, October-November 1968

Pennsylvania Impressionist Edward Redfield is widely regarded as one of the pioneering members of the New Hope School of artists. After studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, Redfield moved to Center Bridge, Pennsylvania, a few miles north of New Hope in Bucks County. There, Redfield developed an interest in depicting his natural environs with a painterly immediacy that gave him an aesthetic kinship with fellow artists Daniel Garber, Walter Schofield and other painters of the New Hope School. In Linekin Bay, Redfield employs his characteristic impressionist style to capture the choppy sea of the eponymous inlet east of his residence near Boothbay Harbor, Maine, where he had summered since 1903.

Famed for his vigorous and energetic renderings of the natural scenery which surrounded him, Redfield’s plein air works have become synonymous with the unsentimental individualism characteristic of early twentieth century American landscape painting. "As a close observer of nature," explains Constance Kimmerle, "Redfield learned to disclose the unique essence of a scene as it emerged from single moments and combined aspects of phenomena. He judged his art as successful to the extent that it provided an authentic intense experience for its viewers and revealed at a glance what it was meant to be" (Edward W. Redfield, Just Values and Fine Seeing, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2004, p. 45).

The present work is the artist's last plein air painting. On the reverse of a photograph of Linekin Bay, now in the possession of a member of the Redfield family, the artist inscribed: "The last painting I made from nature" (as quoted in Ibid., p. 51n122).