Garber's wife, Mary, holds a pot while standing in front of an old bench and shadows cast by the French doors of the artist's workplace in "The Studio Wall,” 1914. This memorable painting measures a generous 56 by 52 inches. Private collection.
:Increasingly becoming considered one of the finest American painters of the Twentieth Century, a leader of the New Hope group/Pennsylvania Impressionists, and a gifted teacher, Daniel Garber (1880–1958) has yet to receive the recognition that many art critics and curators believe he deserves. A chronicler of the sunny side of nature and a dedicated instructor, he created appealing and expressive views of the Pennsylvania countryside and influenced hundreds of students. He excelled at transforming homely, often ugly, subjects into something tranquil and beautiful. Because he never embraced modernism nor later, abstractionism, he has been somewhat overlooked in the latter half of the last century.
Appreciation for Garber's oeuvre and other accomplishments is bound to grow as a result of a long overdue retrospective, "Daniel Garber: Romantic Realist," on view in an unusual collaboration between the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the James A. Michener Art Museum. The Pennsylvania Academy is featuring works executed between 1901 and 1929, on view through April 8, and the Michener is presenting works executed from 1930 to 1955, on view through May 6.
The exhibitions are curated by Lance Humphries, author of the recently published Garber catalogue raisonné, and organized by Lynn Marsden-Atlass, senior curator at the Pennsylvania Academy, and Brian H. Peterson, senior curator at the Michener Art Museum.
Some 170 paintings and works on paper in the two shows illustrate Garber's leading role in the Pennsylvania Impressionist movement, which artist/critic Guy Pene du Bois called America's "first truly national expression." Painting in studios in Philadelphia and rural Bucks County, Garber created distinctively decorative, astutely composed, enduringly appealing canvases. As Peterson observes, "The wide scope of the exhibit[s] provides a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for visitors to see not only his famed landscapes but also his ambitious and evocative figurative work."
Sited at the end of a long forest road, Garber's barn/studio was the focal point of his Bucks County artistic output. This photograph, "The Cottage Garden Studio and Workshop at 'Cuttalossa,'” is loaned by the Garber family.
Born into a farming family in North Manchester, Ind., Garber first studied at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, before enrolling at the Pennsylvania Academy, where he was taught primarily by Thomas Anshutz, but also by William Merritt Chase and Cecilia Beaux, 1899–1905. Anshutz, who preached the gospel of realism, also "encouraged looking to life and nature for inspiration while at the same time finding one's own individual expression," Humphries writes in the exhibition catalog.
Traces of Garber's Munich-impacted studies in Cincinnati, plus Anshutz's teachings, influenced an early Garber painting, "The Aged Sycamore," 1903, a large, darkly toned landscape dominated by vine-clad trees. Chase's influence — as well as that of James McNeill Whistler and Japanese prints — is apparent in a memorable work, "The Studio Wall," 1914, showing Garber's kimono-clad wife in profile holding a vase before a simple, antique bench and blue shadows of Gothic window mullions.
