page_title: Martha Elizabeth Burchfield Richter
section_title: Artist style and influences
hierarchical_section_title: Martha Elizabeth Burchfield Richter / Artist style and influences
caption_attribution_description: English: Buffalo Courier-Express, Photograph of Peggy Richter, Martha Burchfield Richter, and Mrs. Charles Burchfield, c.1968; newsprint; Image courtesy of Burchfield Penney Art Center Archives.
context_page_description: Martha Elizabeth Burchfield Richter was an American watercolorist, the daughter of artist Charles Ephraim Burchfield. Similarly to her father, Burchfield had an affinity for flowering plants, trees and landscapes. She painted almost exclusively with watercolors and is known for her depictions of nature throughout the seasons, and landscapes of rural America. She is known by the customary signature "M. Burchfield" on all her paintings. Including those painted after the change of her surname following her marriage in 1946 to Henry Richter.
  Her paintings and drawings can be found in the Smithsonian, Ford Motor Company, SUNY Buffalo State, and the Burchfield-Penney Art Center. She has been the subject of exhibitions at the Butler Institute of American Art, the Sisti Gallery in Buffalo, Central Park Gallery in Buffalo and the Buffalo Garret Club. She has also had solo exhibits in cities around American including Detroit, Salem and Youngstown.
  The largest collection of Burchfield's paintings and studies are in the personal collection of Louise Simon Schoene of West Seneca, New York.
context_section_description: Burchfield painted almost exclusively with watercolors, often employing a dry technique (using little water) over a pencil sketch, much as her father did.
  She was known for painting en plein air — on the scene and in the open. Burchfield loved summer and relished painting summer scenes, saying that is "when I feel most alive." She was known for driving around until she found a painting location that appealed to her.
  In the opening notes to the program for her solo exhibition at the Butler Institute of American Art in October 1966, Charles Burchfield described Burchfield's watercolors as having "an unspoiled, innocent freshness about them; lyrical in character, with also a tinge of primitiveness. With experience and increasing knowledge, the primitive note has vanished, but the lyrical quality has remained and grown steadily, to which has been added the drama of light and an awareness of the more sophisticated problems of landscape painting. She has an inborn sense of pattern and composition, strikingly evident in her childhood attempts, which has carried through into her mature work."
  In November 1960 the editors of Ford Magazine used eight of Burchfield's paintings to illustrate a four-page story about Gardenville, New York.
  All of Burchfield's instructors insisted that she not be influenced by her father and told her to develop her own style to which she replied, "Every young artist is influenced by someone, even my father."
  Charles taught her "to see" nature on trips across the countryside to paint with him and taught her some of his techniques. Consequently, there was a continual comparison between her work and that of her famous father that she could not escape.
  Art critic and abstract artist Trevor Thomas wrote that Richter "commands an almost impeccable cleanliness of rendering and handles the accepted hieroglyphics for trees, leaves, grass, flowers, and old houses with accustomed assurance."
  He also compared her style to her father's, saying that while Charles had the intuitive ability to evoke a sense of mystery and wonder behind the appearances of ordinary scenes, Burchfield "is content to look at what she views and to delineate it with a given vocabulary of colors and an accepted grammar of strokes. She does not probe beneath the surface for the inherent magic or mystery. She can set the scene well but the drama remains offstage."
  
  She won awards for her work, including first prize from that Buffalo Society of Artists "Statler Show" in Buffalo on May 4, 1950, along with many other first prizes and honorable mentions at various local exhibitions. She also taught painting in adult education courses held in West Seneca.
caption: Buffalo Courier-Express, "Photograph of Peggy Richter, Martha Burchfield Richter, and Mrs. Charles Burchfield", c.1968; newsprint.
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