WHO IS THAT PAINTER, “Red-something?” I asked myself one day. In the scheme of twentieth-century American painters who specialized in landscape, I knew that Mr. Red-something was at the top of the class.
Upon investigation, I realized the error of my ways. There are actually two great landscape painters named Red-something. The first was Granville Redmond (1871-1935), whose career marked California—from San Francisco to Los Angeles—and the second was Edward Willis Redfield (1886-1965) of Pennsylvania.
Both, in their own ways, had brought a kind of American Impressionism to its zenith. They both influenced future outdoor painters in the United States. By Impression here I mean a use of bright color, thick paint, and the atmospheric effects of light at particular times of day. If the French Impressionists painted in Italy and the forests of Brabizon and Fontenblue, Redmond painted the California mountainsides and Redfield the snowscapes of the mid-Atlantic mountains.
Perhaps because of this geographic separation, these parallel achievements have not stood out in the popular imagination about American art history. More prominent, in contrast, have been the colonial history painters at the turn of the 1800s, the Hudson River School that painted upstate New York, and the much later “Ashcan School” of New York painters, Impressionists with an urban orientation in the early 1900s.
To top it off came the great Armory Show in Manhattan in 1913, which put European modernist painting alongside American works, which were just budding as modernist art from a bed of traditional academic painting.
Not that Redmond and Redfield were entirely American originals. As was the custom, both had gone to Paris to study painting after matriculating in American art academies.
Having contracted scarlet fever as a youth, Redmond became deaf, and while attending specialized schools in norther California, his artistic talent was noticed. In time, a scholarship allowed him to go to Paris to study with French masters in 1893, and one of his works was accepted into the 1895 Paris Salon.
On return to America in 1898 (two years before Picasso arrived in Paris) Redmond settled in Los Angeles and began his painting career. In France he had assimilated the new Impressionism, and he began to apply it to West Coast landscapes. He became known for his large, colorful, “California Impressionism” paintings of California mountains, poppy fields, and ocean-side scenery.
His work was so notable, in fact, that he became friends with the movie actor and director Charlie Chaplain, who featured the painter in bit parts in a few of his silent films. Chaplain was taken by the expressiveness of Redmond’s skill at sign language. He also bought his paintings, allowing Redmond to become a known quantity for art collectors.
Between Los Angeles and San Francisco, he was recognized as the one who painted California in bold colors. That reputation rose until his death in 1935, after which he became an artist to collect. He is now a mainstay of museums and retrospectives—but almost entirely in California.
Like Redmond, Redfield’s reputation also would be entirely regional. After studying at the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia (1887-89), he was off to Paris. In Philadelphia, in fact, he had met fellow art student Robert Henri, now a famous-name artist.
He and Henri traveled to Paris to study at the traditional Académie Julian and École des Beaux-Arts. However, they both became enthused by the contrary impulse of Impressionism, and made that their style on return to the United States. Henri, mostly a portrait painter, became an influential instructor in Philadelphia. Redfield moved to the countryside. Landscape would be his forte.
He settled in the small town of New Hope, Pennsylvania, and became a founder of one of the earliest “art colonies” in the United States. The mid-Atlantic and New England landscapes were their venue, and Redfield focused especially on snow scenes. His frequently painted at both Boothbay Harbor and Monhegan Island in Maine, helping to make the two locations storied places for next generations of outdoor painters to make pilgrimage.
However, the New Hope colony was his claim to fame, eventually given the name of “The Pennsylvania School of Landscape Painters.” As one contemporary critic wrote, that group of painters around Redfield “is our first truly national expression.” That was so because the New Hope painters drew on the distinct American landscape, a break from the few other Americans who had been to Paris and came back painting like Parisian Impressionists, subject matter included.
Though not a household name today, Redfield’s then-innovative work gained attention by being prominent in exhibits at the New York bastion of traditional painting, the National Academy. This way he tapped into the American market of high-taste, and transmitted what could be made anew in the American landscape.
Of Redfield’s several legacies, three are particularly interesting. Near the end of his career, he turned to urban painting in New York City, and there applied his mastery of tonal painting to large idealized city scenes (a stark contrast to the contemporary Ashcan School, which, as the derisive name suggested, was more down-and-dirty on its urban subject matter).
Redfield also specialized in painting outdoors, now popularly called plein air. And thirdly, even today, the colony’s home region of Bucks County, now a wealthy subburb on the “mainline” northwest of Philadelphia, is host to one of the more prestigious plein air painting contests in the country.
In all, the two “Red-something” painters sank down the early roots of two regional art centers, and from those roots much else bloomed. That they are not as famous as, say, Jackson Pollack and Andy Warhol, says something about geography being destiny in the art world. They did not have New York media behemoths behind them. Yet in countless ways, they did bring an American-minded Impressionism to landscape painting across the United States.