The Eyes of Houses
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​                                                                                                                By Richard Wootten

Recent research into the earlier years of Charles Burchfield's life has resulted in quite a different picture of the young artist, so often described as a friendless, solitary youth walking with his dog in the woods of Salem, Ohio.
We now realize that 1910 was a pivotal year in Burchfield's creative, intellectual and social growth. If he had been friendless before, he wasn't anymore. If he had suffered from low self-esteem before, it wasn't evident by late 1910. His journal entries became celebrations of life - his and that of his family and friends. And a key to understanding his fascination with humble houses as subjects of watercolors may lie within his boyhood home.
What prompted these recent discoveries was the 1993 decision of the Burchfield Foundation to provide funds to purchase the artist's boyhood home at 867 East Fourth Street in Salem. The house was then refurbished after much neglect, is owned by The Burchfield Homestead Society, a newly-formed non-profit, tax-exempt entity. Society members, planning to make the home a museum, are Burchfield fans mostly living in the Salem area. Burchfield lived in the house from the age of five in 1898 to the age of 28 in 1921, when, engaged to be married to Bertha Kenreich, he left Salem to take a job as a designer at the Birge Wallpaper Company in Buffalo, New York. By 1921, however, he had completed nearly half of his lifetime's output of art.
The Burchfield family sold the house after the deaths of both Charles' sister Frances and his mother just nine days apart in 1933. Owned by a half-dozen families through the years, it remained a single family home until the 1970s when it was converted into a duplex, with new walls added and former entrance ways blocked.
The society has restored the house to the way it was in 1917. That year Burchfield experienced his most intensive creative streak, completing more than 400 paintings. He called it his "Golden Year."
The society's problem was to understand the layout of the rooms in 1917 and that problem was solved with the help of Nancy Weekly, curator at the Burchfield-Penney Art Center in Buffalo, New York. She provided a floor plan of the house drawn by Charles Burchfield probably as a school assignment.
(Burchfield journal entry for Nov. 10, 1910 noted, "I spent the evening starting a plan for our house, having nothing else to do." The next day he wrote, "I stayed at home and finished the plan of the house.") He was a senior at Salem High School at the time.)
The floor plan was a great find, answering all the questions of the layout. The plan also solved another fascinating mystery that had plagued the society. Burchfield had told biographer John Baur that in 1898 when he was five years old, his father died, and he with his mother, two sisters and three brothers moved to Salem, his mother's hometown. Two of his mother's brothers bought them a "six room house" on East Fourth Street.
The current house has nine rooms, not five. Burchfield's floor plan depicts both that early small house and its expanded version which stands today.
When you enter the house today and realize which portion of it was the original house, you marvel at its small size. The original two-story house measured 18 feet across and 24 feet deep. The seven family members occupying such small quarters must have felt like sardines.
Exactly when was the enlarged house completed? The city of Salem has no building permits on file from so long ago, but the best bet would be 1910 for two reasons. Found written in pencil on the parlor wall where wallpaper had been removed was the signature of Charles Burchfield's younger brother Fred with the date "June 2, 1910." Fred was then 14. Also written on the plaster was "W.G. Rich" and again the date, "June 2, 1910." Rich, the 1910 Salem City Directory revealed, was a house painter and wallpaper hanger. He lived directly across the street from the Burchfields in a house the artist was to immortalize in his 1920 painting "Sleet Storm." These inscriptions are on a wall that didn't exist in the first version of the house. Other clues to the 1910 date seeming correct are in the Burchfield family photo album made available to the society by one of its board members, Jim Burchfield, great nephew of Charles and grandson of Fred. The photo album had been owned by Charles' sister Louise (1888-1982), the last of his siblings to die. She left it to Fred's son Tim, Jim's father.

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The photos capture a grand time in the life of the Burchfield family. Obviously they were very proud of their new house, for they dressed up in their Sunday best clothes and posed on the new front porch, by the new back porch, and took turns posing in front of the new addition to the rear of the house. Also included are crowded shots of the young Burchfields and their friends having parties in the house, crowding onto the front porch swing or playing musical chairs in the living room. On close study of the photos and by careful comparisons, you learn to recognize the different brothers. Charles always seemed to be the cutup of the lot, painfully singing away or making funny faces. In one crowd shot in which his young friends seem to be studying their German school books, Charles is leaning over, scratching his head in mock puzzlement. Charles was hamming it up. His final grade in German his junior year was 98 and his senior year, 99.
And in these photos, Charles appears to be about the age of 17, which he was in 1910.
One photo, in which Charles appears slightly younger, shows him sitting on rubble behind the house, apparently when the addition was being built. Could it be that it took a year or two to complete the addition? If true, imagine the inconvenience the family must have lived through during that time.
The family was poor. Charles, the second to last child, was the first sibling to graduate from high school. His older brothers and sisters had quit school to support the large family.
By 1907, the city directory lists sisters Frances (age 21) as a clerk at the A.W. Jones & Co. Dry Goods Store; James, 25, as a coremaker at the Deming Co. (where he had worked since 1898); Joseph, 17, as a clerk at the M.S. Hawkins Drug Store; and Louise, 19, as an operator at the Central District & Printing Telegraph Co. Apparently by then, their combined incomes was growing enough to eventually pay for the house expansion.
It's easy to imagine that this poor working class family saw the newly enlarged house as their arrival into respectability. From the photos, it appears they had many friends. In the 1980s, three elderly Salem residents, now deceased, recalled those parties. Dick Hutchinson, Mabel Coy and Lida Brill remembered the get-togethers as all innocent fun - playing card games, checkers, charades, enjoying refreshments, under the watchful eye of Mother Burchfield - all in a high spirit of conviviality and fellowship.
It's also easy to imagine the pressure and responsibility young Charles must have felt as the talented son, whom the family was cheering on, the sensitive, overachiever who seemed to possess the promise of success. He became determined in the 10th grade that he would graduate in 1911 as the class valedictorian. And he did.
In the spring of 1910 he came down with what doctors called a case of "brain fever," which Charles was later to call nervous exhaustion. He was trying hard to draw all of the local wildflowers and blossoming fruit trees in great detail and keep his school grades high. He knew his mother loved wildflowers and he was determined to find as many as possible to plant beside the grape arbor in their back yard. Perhaps his "brain fever" was a result of the extreme pressure he felt from trying too hard to please, or the guilt he felt because his four older siblings had dropped out of school, sacrificing their further education's, in order to work full-time, and he, though having worked after school since the seventh grade, was the first to have the privilege to graduate from high school.
In small working class industrial communities in the early 20th century, many children and adolescents were urged by their parents or felt obliged to drop out of school early to support the family. Completing high school was considered a luxury. Child labor was still routine at that time. Although a few states had passed law limiting child labor, effective federal legislation wasn't to arrive for another 28 years (The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.)
When Charles Burchfield's oldest brother Jim died in 1956, the artist wrote of his gratitude to Jim for being the first sibling to go to work to support the family and allowing Charles to have a "carefree boyhood".

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It is obvious from his journals at that time that his mother was the most important person in his life and after her, his two sisters. Those journals are truly endearing in the way they express his love for his mother. The family was close-knit and caring. When Charles began to paint in earnest, he picked subjects for which he had an emotional feeling. The houses he depicts are neighboring homes of his friends, not the more architecturally interesting Victorian mansions on South Lincoln Avenue where the town's industrial moguls lived.
He once wrote, "After you live in a place for a certain length of time, things and places begin to belong to you." He must have felt that way about his immediate neighborhood in Salem. It's interesting that so many of his paintings at that period were views seen by looking out the new windows of the enlarged portion of the house. They were new vistas of places that "belonged" to him and he saw them with a romantic eye.
As Art historian Walter Baigell wrote, "To a person of Burchfield's sensitivity a casual glance out a window was an intense and emotional experience, and the landscape he observed each day had a profound effect upon him. Surely had he lived elsewhere, his art would have evolved differently."
Burchfield's sensitivity, heightened by his childhood reading of such imaginative stories from the Brothers Grimm, in which Good and Evil are constantly in combat, eventually led to his 1917 fanciful style of mood-creating paintings.
His observation noted in his journals that houses are "often more moody than nature" is borne out by a walk through his old Salem neighborhood today. Many of the small houses have central doorways (mouths?) flanked by windows to the left and right (eyes?). Many turn-of-the-century buildings in downtown Salem have curved window caps above the glass which make them resemble eyes. If, in Burchfield's young imagination, houses had eyes that stare out at the person passing by, they also have eyes from which a person inside the house can see out. Hence, so many of his early paintings are views looking out his windows. And some of those views out the windows at 867 E. Fourth St. stayed in his subconscious many years after he left Salem in 1921. For example, his "Cherry Blossom Snow," completed in 1945 is a view looking northwest from the downstairs hallway of the expanded house.
His unusual 1917 invention of "Conventions of Abstract Thought," in which he created motifs that represent gloomy moods such as Fear, Morbidness, Dangerous Brooding, Insanity, Menace, and Fascination of Evil, may well have been inspired by the steeple of the local Baptist Church.
Burchfield, who in later life embraced organized religion, was at war with it as a teen-ager. What bothered him was that his dear mother said she didn't quite feel she was morally good enough to belong to a local church. To Charles, that meant that the person most important to him, the one he loved the most, didn't feel qualified to be a member of a local congregation. And Charles, required to attend Sunday School at the Presbyterian Church, vented his rage in his journals, calling church-goers "hypocrites."
From a certain angle, the Baptist Church tower resembled a bird with a parrot-like beak below two circular windows that resembled eyes. It didn't take the heated imagination of a Charles Burchfield to see it. It really did look like a bird. To Burchfield those eyes represented the "eyes of imbecility" and that's the way he painted it in "Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night" in 1917.
Another reason why he saw the windows as two imbecilic eyes may have had more to do with Salem street names than religion. Salem's city fathers, always patriotic Americans, honored their slain presidents by naming their streets after them. The Baptist Church was situated on the southeast corner of what Salem residents called Assassination Corner. To the south ran Lincoln Avenue, to the north Garfield Avenue and to the east McKinley Avenue.
When young Charles Burchfield saw those church tower windows as eyes, was he reminded of the eyes of John Wilkes Booth, the half-crazed actor; Charles J. Guiteau, a religious fanatic; and Leon Czolgosz, an emotionally deranged anarchist?
Later, in 1919, a reading of Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg,Ohio" reiterated the concept of "eyes" that Burchfield had already embraced. Anderson wrote, ""The houses have faces. The windows are eyes, Some houses smile at you, others frown."
Moody houses and buildings remained one of the subjects of Burchfield's paintings up into the 1960s, when the pull of nature, captured in his last expressionistic masterpieces, pushed mere man-made structures off the frame.
Today, you can stand inside Burchfield's boyhood home in Salem, look out a window at the unchanged neighborhood, and see the reality of what Burchfield saw in 1915. To see what his fertile imagination added to his views from the "eyes" of the house, you must study his paintings of those window views - paintings embued with his affection for his mother, siblings, friends and home town.

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