The first thing that happens in Charles Burchfield’s Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night is not an image but a weather. Black paint falls straight down the sheet. It does not describe rain so much as it repeats it. The sheet is tall, 77.2 centimeters high and 50 wide, made from two pieces of cream wove paper joined and laid down on cardboard, and the rain respects that construction. It runs in the long direction, pooling at roofs, thinning where it lifts, thickening where it gathers. In places it looks as if Burchfield let the wash carry itself, a gravity the hand only steered. In other places he dragged a dry brush so the paper’s tooth shows through. You can see the alternation between a watercolor that flows and a watercolor that scrapes. That alternation becomes the sound of the night.
The architecture under that rain is not arranged as a town view. It is compressed until there is almost no distance. Two houses press in from left and right. Their roofs meet near the middle of the sheet, and between them, where you expect a street or a gap of sky, a church spire pushes up. The spire belongs to Salem’s Baptist church, a building that has since burned, but in December 1917 it stood close enough to Burchfield’s childhood house that its bell could shake his bedroom. Burchfield put the spire not behind the houses but wedged between them, so the bell seems to be inside the block. The spire carries a pattern of blue chevrons and diamonds, a pale, precise ornament that holds the eye while everything around it dissolves. Its vertical edges are sharper than the houses that flank it, which sag and bloom at their foundations as if the lower halves were made of wet paper, which in a sense they were.
Look at the houses more slowly. Their walls are rendered in a limited range of grays, blacks, and a muted olive. Their windows and doors are not openings but weights. The black of a doorway sits on the paper like a hole that has been filled. The small panes of a second story window are outlined and then left dark, so the house seems to be looking out without light. On the house to the left, the rain has been pulled down so hard that the clapboard and the shadow become the same stroke. On the house to the right, a gutterless eave lets water sheet directly off the roof plane. There is no ground line to stand on. The street is a wash of reflected gray that could be wet asphalt or a thin skin of ice. The painting places you at eye level with the second floors, not on the sidewalk, so you are already slightly above the weather and still inside it.
The rain itself has a structure. Burchfield does not dot the air with drops. He makes long verticals that vary in width and density. Some are thin and hairlike. Some are broad, almost half an inch wide, where he loaded the brush and let it drag. Between them he left narrower intervals of untouched or lightly toned paper so the whole surface vibrates like a wet window seen from inside a warm room. Around the spire, those verticals are interrupted by a different mark: hooked, comma-like shapes that curl around the tower. The Cleveland Museum of Art record describes these as standing for Fear in Burchfield’s early graphic language. The distinction matters. Rain falls. Fear curves. One is weather. The other is a response that has taken a shape and will not fall straight.
In the lower left, behind a dark mullion, a small window glows. Inside it a Christmas tree stands, rendered as a tight, slightly shaky triangle of yellow and green, with a few flecks of red. The scale is disconcerting. The houses are huge and close, almost too large for the sheet. The tree is tiny, perhaps half an inch tall on the original, and yet it carries a surprising amount of color and care. Burchfield described, in a note preserved by the Cleveland Museum, that as a boy he feared the bell’s ominous ring, which he called a dull roar dying slowly and with a growl, and that on stormy winter nights he calmed himself in bed by thinking of Christmas. The painting keeps both facts in one place. The ominous source is at the center and the comforting recollection is small and lit at the edge. Neither cancels the other. The composition makes you hold them together.
That coexistence is the reason this watercolor repays a long look. The painting is often discussed as part of Burchfield’s golden year, the burst of work in 1917 when he was twenty four, living in Salem after a brief enrollment at the National Academy of Design that he left after a single day, working an office job in town and painting at night and on his lunch walks. Half his lifetime output, by his own later count and by the numbers preserved at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, was made in Salem between 1915 and 1917. The house where he lived from age five to twenty eight became, in curator Henry Adams’s phrase, the most important house in American art history, not because it was grand but because its windows provided so many paintings. The golden year followed self doubt, a return home, and a period of looking hard at a small number of streets, trees, and skies until they gave up more than a view.
To understand what he was trying to do that winter, it helps to know that Burchfield had begun to formalize a private set of signs he called Conventions for Abstract Thoughts. By the end of 1917 he was assigning graphic equivalents to states of mind. The hooked forms surrounding the church tower signified Fear. The tight, dark surrounds of doors and windows signified Morbidness and Evil. Other marks elsewhere stood for sounds: insects and frogs had their own calligraphies, cicada noise was a zigzag radiating outward, wind had a different forward lean. The system was not a cipher to be decoded line by line. It was a way to let a feeling have a continuous presence on the paper without illustrating it. In Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night the conventions are used with notable clarity. You can see them, you can name them, and the painting still works if you do not. The fear does not depend on the label. It depends on the way a curved mark breaks the vertical rule of the rain and crowds the spire as sound would crowd air.
Burchfield arrived at that language without much direct support. He had studied at the Cleveland School of Art from 1912 to 1916 with Henry G. Keller, Frank N. Wilcox, and William J. Eastman, teachers who encouraged close observation and a respect for watercolor that many academies treated as a secondary medium. Keller in particular led a generation of Ohio watercolor painters often grouped as the Cleveland School, and Burchfield later acknowledged how deeply Keller affected his growth. He had also absorbed, in school, examples of European modernism and of Chinese brush painting, two traditions that taught him very different ways to let a stroke stand for more than the thing it traces. Yet his early Salem work does not look like Keller’s, which tends to be more openly atmospheric and less systematically symbolic, nor does it look like imported Fauvism or Cubism, though it uses broad simplified areas of color that can recall those movements at a glance.
What he did instead was to take watercolor’s supposed limitations and make them essential. He worked standing at an easel, unusual for a watercolorist, and he used a dry brush technique on machine-made paper, laying down pigment with very little water so the surface remained active and could be reworked, sometimes months or years later. The physical record of Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night shows that kind of reworking. There are passages where gouache has been added over graphite to stiffen a plane, and passages where earlier washes have been lifted or overrun. The joined sheet is also important. Working on two pieces allowed him a vertical span taller than a standard block, and the horizontal seam, though carefully aligned, creates a subtle structural line at about the midpoint of the houses. He hid the seam but left its pressure in the composition. The painting feels slightly stacked, as if the upper half holding the spire were pressing down on the lower half holding the lit window. That stacking is part of the weather as well.
In December 1917 the weather was also biography. Burchfield was not yet the Buffalo wallpaper designer he would become in 1921 at M. H. Birge and not yet the New York exhibiting artist who would resign that job in 1929 after the Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries offered representation and who would receive the Museum of Modern Art’s first one-person show devoted to his early watercolors in 1930. He was still in Salem, walking to and from work with sketchbooks, completing paintings at night from notes and memory. The year had been extraordinarily productive, and he knew it. He considered this sheet among the greatest accomplishments of that year, a claim recorded in the Cleveland Museum’s description. The judgment matters because it shows that the invention of the fear marks and the handling of rain were not incidental experiments but the core of what he believed he had found.
It is easy to read the painting only through its symbols and miss how much work the gray does. The gray is not one color. It moves from a warm, slightly brownish gray at the base of the left house to a cooler, bluish gray at the top of the spire’s shadow to a near black where rain loads the eave. Gouache lightens some planes, graphite darkens others, and the untouched cream of the paper functions as a high value that reads as reflected street light or wet snow. The limited blue pattern on the spire works precisely because so much else is withheld. The eye goes to that blue and then must return to the dark, the way an ear that has caught a bell must return to the ordinary hum of a house. The small yellow window does similar work in the complementary range. Its warmth is not bright. It is contained, framed by black mullions and by the broader cool. In a painting without that window, the night would be a demonstration. With it, the night becomes an experience that includes a choice about what to hold in the mind while the bell is still ringing.
Burchfield’s middle period, from roughly 1919 to 1943, moved away from this concentrated symbolic language toward more solid, often larger watercolors of small towns and industrial sites that placed him, for exhibition purposes, near the American Scene and Regionalist painters. Those paintings look more finished in a conventional sense. They use watercolor to approximate the weight of oil, with dense surfaces and fully described forms, and they are the images most often reproduced in surveys. Critics found ready comparisons. One compared him to Edward Hopper on a rainy day, a line that captures a certain shared attention to ordinary streets but misses the difference that Burchfield had no interest in the quiet, isolated figure that anchors so many Hopper scenes. Burchfield’s streets are rarely empty of agency. Even when no figure appears, the houses behave as if they were listening.
In the 1940s and thereafter, especially from 1943 until his death in 1967, he returned to the preoccupations of the early Salem years and enlarged them into the expansive, hallucinatory landscapes of swirling trees, exaggerated blooms, and colossal skies for which he is now most celebrated. He published statements about wanting to paint not what he sees but what is there, and that an artist must invent symbols which make the work seem more real than what is in front of him. The late work delivers that ambition at a mural scale, with late works such as December Storm and The Moth and the Thunderclap pushing color and calligraphy far beyond the 1917 range. Yet the early night painting retains a focus those later works sometimes diffuse. In the late paintings, feeling becomes weather that fills the whole sky. In Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night, feeling is still located, attached to a specific bell, a specific spire, a specific window, and the distance between them can be measured across the paper.
That specificity helps place the painting in a longer story about American watercolor in the 1910s. Watercolor was widely enjoyed and widely dismissed as fragile, impermanent, suited to sketches rather than major statements. Burchfield was unusual among his most ambitious contemporaries in committing to it exclusively. He argued for its capacity to hold intensity and to be preserved with proper handling, and modern practice has largely followed his advice, showing such sheets under reduced light and for limited periods rather than treating them as lesser oils. The choice of watercolor for a subject that wanted darkness was not obvious. Oil could have supplied black more easily and steadily. Watercolor required that darkness be built through successive washes that still allow paper to breathe. The blacks in this sheet are never flat. They carry graphite underneath and slight variations where gouache has been added. The result is a darkness that is active rather than opaque, a darkness that still contains air, which is exactly what a winter night needs if the bell is to move through it.
There is also the matter of sound. Burchfield repeatedly tried to give sound a visible life. His journals, more than ten thousand pages now housed at the Burchfield Penney, record not only what he saw on his Salem walks but how he wanted a sound to look on the paper. He described wanting to catch the ringing of bells, the croak of frogs, the high thin whine of insects without resorting to a simple illustrative figure with a mouth open. In this painting the solution is characteristically indirect. The rain is the medium through which the sound travels, so its verticals become carriers. The hooked fear shapes that interrupt those verticals are the evidence that something has passed through. You do not see the bell moving. You see the air altered around its tower. The device avoids the two easier alternatives. He could have painted a figure covering its ears, which would have psychologized the night in a familiar way. He could have left the sound out entirely, making a competent rainy view. Doing neither, he lets the architecture do the listening.
The scale reinforces that choice. At 77 centimeters high, the sheet is taller than it is wide, which accentuates the spire and the vertical weather. The two houses, rendered close and slightly oversized, function like a stage flat that has been pushed forward. Their rooflines are placed high enough that the spire must rise above them to be seen at all. That high placement makes the spire feel both distant, because it is behind, and intimate, because it is squeezed. The eye cannot settle on a stable foreground and background. It shuttles between the immediate wetness of the walls and the slightly more distant fact of the tower. That shuttling is a fair equivalent for how a bell is experienced at night: located somewhere out there and yet inside the room where you lie awake.
For those who know Burchfield only from the bright, ecstatic tree and flower paintings of his later decades, the restraint of this night may surprise. There is almost no saturated color beyond the two controlled notes of blue on the spire and yellow in the window. There is no swirling vortex, no multiplied sun. The energy is all vertical and gravitational. It is worth looking at the spire again with that in mind. The blue chevrons point upward while the rain points down. The tower carries its own counter movement to the weather. Fear collects around it in curves, as if sound were trying to climb. That small opposition, an upward ornament against a downward wash, keeps the spire from being merely ominous. It has a liveliness the houses have lost. They sag. It holds.
Connoisseurs of Burchfield’s early symbolic period sometimes treat the Conventions for Abstract Thoughts as a code to be applied like a legend. The Cleveland Museum’s description helpfully glosses the hooks as Fear and the dark doors and windows as Morbidness and Evil, and those definitions are useful as entries. Yet the painting does not want to be read as a chart. If every shape were reduced to a single word, the sheet would become a sentence and its visual pressure would go slack. The more sustained way to use the information is to see that in 1917 Burchfield gave himself permission to make a shape mean a feeling and then to set that shape loose among observed forms. The resulting interaction is not a translation. It is a weather system in which two kinds of mark meet and modify each other. You can no longer tell where observation ends and invention begins, which is precisely the point about a stormy night when a child lies in bed and the bell becomes part of the rain.
It is also worth stating what the painting refuses. Salem in 1917 was a small Ohio town with a Baptist church at its center, a place where many artists of the period would have found either nostalgia or reformist subject matter. Burchfield provides neither. He does not prettify the houses, with their plain trim and tight lots, nor does he critique them. He does not populate the street with figures who would explain the bell’s social function. He does not introduce an overt religious narrative, though a church is at the center. The painting’s respect for place is of another kind. It records the specific pressure a known sound can exert on known walls, and it does so from the exact distance at which a boy would hear it through a closed window while thinking of another season.
At the end of the 1910s Burchfield would leave Salem, marry Bertha Kenreich in 1922, raise five children, work in Buffalo’s wallpaper trade, and gradually answer the New York market’s appetite for legible American scenes. The night paintings would become less frequent, less clenched, more willing to let sky and open land do the emotional work. When he returned to the earlier concerns after 1943, he did so with a larger brush and a broader chromatics that made the earlier small-scale inventions look, in retrospect, almost private. It is that privacy that now makes Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night feel so precise. The resources are modest: paper, graphite, watercolor, gouache, two joined sheets. The sources are local: two houses, a spire, a rain, a remembered sound, a small tree. The invention is the permission to put a feeling around a tower in marks that are not rain and not architecture but something the mind adds when it cannot stop listening.
The window with the tree is the place to finish, because the painting finishes there. Burchfield could have left the lower left dark. The composition would have been consistent, a night of rain and dread with a bell at its center. By placing that small warm light at the edge, he refuses consistency. The light is not compositionally necessary. It is humanly necessary. It marks the fact that during a rainy winter night the child who heard the bell taught himself a counter image, and that the adult who painted the night remembered the counter image as part of the same truth. The painting’s darkness is convincing because that small light is still on. Its bell matters because that tree is still visible. The two facts are set side by side on a creamed paper field, one large and vertical and invasive, the other tiny and framed and tended, and the space between them is rain that continues to fall straight down, carrying whatever is in the air from one place to the other.