Charles Burchfield's painted memories

I will not lie, even to be a patriot. A proper proportion of the sweat, flies, heat, dirt and drudgery of it all shall go in. I am a competent witness and I will intend to tell the whole truth.(29)

Burchfield likewise defended his frank depiction of American life, declaring that by 1920

I began to fed that the great epic poetry of midwest American life, and my own connection to it....I could despise certain elements in American life more intelligently, and I realized more completely that there were many things to love and admire, or find poetry in...I became interested in the reliques of what might be termed our tag-end pioneer days - the false-front stores and wooden sidewalks, old frame houses and other buildings of former days....What chiefly interested me about them was their picturesqueness, and in some cases, quaint humor and romance of days departed. If I presented them in all their garish and crude primitiveness and unlovely decay, it was merely through a desire to be honest about them.(30)

In his letter to the Salem News of June 17, 1938, he recalled that about the time of his flint exhibition in New York City, Sinclair Lewis's novel Main Street was such a great success

that its exaggerations were accepted as fact, and, as a consequence, any forthright representation of a small town scene was held to be done in a light vein, ironical or satirical.

Such was my fate....! I was supposed to be...holding up my subjects to scorn where as what I was aiming at was an intensive realism which is quite something else again. For the artist who aims to exploit everything ugly in a given place or situation is as far from the truth as someone whose aim is sweet prettification.

Of course, what both Garland and Burchfield were telling the truth about was a past that they could recall but not recover. In paintings such as Evening [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE XI OMITTED], for example, Burchfield reminds the viewer not only that an individual's life is transitory, but that ways of life die as well. The artist explained the complexity behind the painting's title, writing:

It is not only "Evening" of the day, but also of the year, when Nature is "spent," all her work for the year finished, and the earth is slowly mouldering into decay....It is [also] "Evening" in the lives of the three people sitting under the trees. They live alone, all they have left in life are memories. They sit brooding.(31)

The early Garden of Memories [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE XV OMITTED] expressed the same sentiments, but according to Burchfield, Evening could also be understood as a statement about changing American culture, signifying the "evening of a certain phase of farm life in America. The old farms are going and a new conception is coming in."(32) Certainly the old house and barn behind the three seated figures have seen better times - as have many buildings in Burchfield's paintings.

The artist was enchanted by old houses, frequently aging houses in his paintings that in reality were only twenty or thirty years old. One such house is shown in Sulphurous Evening [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE XIV OMITTED]. Lit by an ominous yellow light right after a summer storm, the house appears tired and its weathered siding sags. However, the house in Buffalo that was a model for this picture appears well cared for and almost new in a photograph taken several years after the painting was completed.(33) Even when painting contemporary subjects Burchfield portrayed them as if they were the memories of future generations, for he was always painfully aware that the present is continually becoming the past.(34)