LAHASKA, PENN. -- The official rediscovery of the New Hope School of painters - Edward Willis Redfield, Daniel Garber, William Langsom Lathrop, Robert Spencer and Walter Schofield, and a few others - began with the sale of the Dr John McDonough collection in 1979 and accelerated through the 1980s with a smattering of exhibitions around the country.

By the time Beacon Hill Fine Art in New York organized "An American Tradition: The Pennsylvania Impressionists" in 1996, the circle best known for its ashen depictions of snow-covered fields, weathered farmhouses, and groves denuded by thin hibernal light was again in ascendance, enjoying the celebrity that brought it to national attention between 1910 and 1930, when New Hope canvases were widely exhibited and collected.

Best known of the Pennsylvania Impressionists is Redfield (1869-1965), who studied in Philadelphia before taking classes in Paris. Though he returned from France to live a quiet life in the country with his French wife and six children, he maintained amiable artworld ties with luminaries such as Robert Henri, with whom he once shared an apartment and studio.

After settling in Bucks County, where he restored a 112-acre farm in Center Bridge, Redfield developed a plein air approach to landscape painting that was widely admired - in 1923, he sold a canvas for a princely $7,000 - and copied. He later complained, in fact, that his colleagues' derivative snowscapes looked like a billowing white laundry line when hung in one room.

Until 1996, little more than a few magazine articles and catalogue entries had been written about Redfield, who died just short of his 96th birthday. John M.W. Fletcher changed that with his publication Edward Willis Redfield, 1869-1965: An American Impressionist, His Paintings And The Man Behind The Palette. The Antiques and The Arts Weekly contributor assumed the task of documenting the dean of Pennsylvania landscape painters after realizing that critical information was in danger of being forever lost as Redfield's family, friends and colleagues passed on.

A Pennsylvania native who knows every dimple and crease of the contoured land Redfield painted so regularly, Fletcher called first on the artist's daughter-in-law, Dorothy Hayman Redfield, who directed him to 80 of the 1,090 paintings documented in his book. "I went from one relative to the next," notes the author, who spent the next five years compiling his data.

The book, now considered a principle source on Redfield, is a treasury of primary material. Fletcher assembled every scrap of information he could find on the artist, including a chronology, list of awards and prizes, gallery affiliations and shows (the prolific painter had 265 of them), family records, correspondence, auction prices realized, and bibliography. Every Redfield painting known to Fletcher was catalogued, providing title, date, dimension and provenance.

The discovery of a cache of letters at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., persuaded Fletcher, who subtitled his book The Man Behind The Palette, to compose a portrait of the artist. In youth, middle age, and dotage, Redfield emerges as an independent, forthright and understated man; a determined force in American art.

A tribute, written by C. Minnigerode, Redfield's confidant and director of the Corcoran Museum until his retirement in 1947, was published for the first time in Edward Willis Redfield, 1869-1965. Excerpts, imparting much of the flavor of Fletcher's volume, follow:

"The intimate association which I have been privileged to have with E.W. Redfield for more than a quarter of a century has been one of the bright spots of my life. The experiences we have shared together are so manifold and so varied that it would be impossible to record more than a very few of them. I have been out with him when he was painting both in winter and in summer.

"We have taken innumerable long motor trips together, visited many art exhibitions, worked together on art juries, fished in the Delaware River, played bridge, attended World Series baseball games, traveled to San Francisco, stayed repeatedly at each other's homes, etc., etc., ad infinitum. For more than a generation it has been a case of `Reddy' and `Minni.'

"Redfield is generally conceded to be one of the most able and successful landscape painters this country has produced. But he is much more than that. He is one of the strongest characters and one of the most interesting personalities in the American art world. The country home of Mr and Mrs Redfield near Center Bridge, Pennsylvania, has for years been like a second home to me. Whenever I happen to visit New York, the trip is incomplete unless I manage to stop over and see them, either going or coming - never as a guest, but always as one of the family.

"... Reddy is a plain, blunt, outspoken man, a `diamond in the rough,' if you choose, a loyal and devoted friend, the most independent man I know, one who is scrupulously careful to give everyone the fairest treatment and who is equally careful to exact it; a man who has never hesitated to call a spade `a spade' no matter to whom he may be speaking.

"The world thinks of Redfield only as a landscape painter of national and international fame, but that is only the beginning of his activities and interests. He is a `Jack of all trades,' and he is good at them all.

"... He is possessed of a keen mind and a powerful body, and he works them both. With his own hands he built the house in which he formerly lived at Center Bridge on the banks of the Delaware River, and a large amount of the material of which it is built is driftwood, which he salvaged from that stream.

"... He is an expert gardener and no one can produce finer vegetables or lovelier flowers than he. He excels as a carpenter and especially as a cabinetmaker, and I defy anyone to tell just which parts of the old Windsor chairs (many of which he has collected) were restored by him. He makes hooked rugs; each one is a work of art. When the walls of a room need repapering, he buys the wallpaper by the roll and puts it on himself.

"... Some years ago he bought a very lovely new place located about half a mile from his old one. It had on it one of those stone dwellings which are so characteristic of that country, but it was in bad condition.

"Redfield for months was busy remodeling it. No contractor could have done it better. He changed the entire interior of the house, added a stone wing, installed an electric lighting system, put on a new roof, added bathrooms, provided a fine studio, etc. He is his own architect and his own builder; did almost the entire job with his own hands. It is now finished and he and his family are living in it.

"... When the job was finished, we contemplated it with satisfaction for a few minutes; donned fresh clothing; decided that we needed a little rest and relaxation; got into Redfield's car for a little drive; kept on going until we found ourselves up in Connecticut; called on our mutual friend, the late J. Alden Weir at his lovely home near Windham [sic], Conn.; brought him back with us that night to Center Bridge; took the wrong road four or five times; had several flat tires; arrived at Redfield's house at 4:30 am the next morning; took a stiff drink of Scotch all around - and went to bed. The purpose of that drive was `rest and relaxation.'

"For several decades Redfield has enjoyed unusual success. He ranks today as one of the foremost contemporary landscape painters and there is scarcely an art museum in the country that does not boast of at least one example of his work.

"For years there has been an active demand for his pictures, not only on the part of the public art institutions but also by individual collectors and for private homes. His pictures appeal with equal force to both art connoisseurs and cultivated laymen. Hence their popularity.

"The list of prize awards he has received at various art exhibitions is one of the longest and most complete of which any American artist can boast and it has been said that he has received so many medals that his children can play checkers with them.

"Like other artists, Redfield, of course, has a studio but he has never been known to paint more than one or two pictures in it. His studio is, in reality, his living room. He paints his pictures out-of-doors, directly from nature, and he has frequently worked while standing in snow a foot or more deep with the thermometer hovering around zero. He says he has no respect for winter pictures painted on the fifteenth floor of a studio building in the city of New York in the month of August.

"He paints with incredible rapidity and usually finished a picture in a few hours of uninterrupted and intensive work, or, as the artists express it, `in one shot.'

"At times his rule has been to paint a `picture a day.' He has often completed a large canvas, of perhaps twenty square feet, in a single morning or afternoon. He contends that, as nature is undergoing constant change every hour of the day, he can not truthfully interpret a landscape without being able to record these fleeting changes as they occur.

"Therefore, when he once begins, he must paint with great rapidity and he has worked for many years in order to acquire this amazing facility. He was once asked how long it took him to paint a picture and his reply was `Forty years or four hours - as you please!'"

Edward Willis Redfield, 1869-1965 by J.M.W. Fletcher may be purchased for $70 hardcover plus $3.50 postage and handling by writing to P.O. Box 533, Lahaska, Penn. 18931, or calling 215/257-2794.