Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts

Provenance:

Charles E. Burchfield Foundation

Painted circa 1915 when Burchfield was still a student at the Cleveland School of Art, The Forest of Wild Thyme is based on the beloved book of poetry by Alfred Noyes. Noyes published The Forest of Wild Thyme in 1905 and claimed that his motivation for writing it was that he sought to “follow the careless and happy feet of children back into the kingdom of those dreams which… are the sole reality worth living and dying for…” ¹ These words could have been spoken by Burchfield who often sought inspiration for his work through his own childhood memories and produced fantastic works that appear dreamlike.

Burchfield entered the Cleveland School of Art with the intention of becoming a commercial illustrator; The Forest of Wild Thyme could possibly have been conceived as a book cover design. The style of the frame and the text of the work recall the design of the English Arts and Crafts movement, clearly showing the influence of Louis Rorheimer who taught at the school until 1918 and emphasized the study of this period in his classes.

At first glance, The Forest of Wild Thyme could almost be an abstract work; the brilliant colors and geometric patterning do not evoke a sense of nature. Yet upon closer inspection, the black and white design is actually an extreme close up of the seeds in a sunflower, meticulously rendered. The yellow petals make up the flame-like pattern at the perimeter. The brilliant blue background makes reference to the fauvist-inspired colors found in Burchfield’s work at this time. An oversized beetle sits upon a flower at left, giving a point of reference to the scale of the two small children who run across the leaf in the lower right corner. There is no evidence to indicate that Noyes might have seen this work, but it would undoubtedly have appealed to his sense of imagination.