Red Barn (The Slaughter House)

1937
Watercolor and ink on white wove paper

This watercolor relates directly to an oil painting entitled The Slaughter House (private collection, New Jersey). Both were executed in 1937 and exhibited that same year at Alfred Stieglitz's gallery, An American Place.   

In 1933 after the death of his mother, Dove and his wife moved from New York City to Geneva—the Finger Lakes region of Northwestern New York State—to live on a farm (inherited from his mother) in the town where he had grown up.  Though they moved there with much trepidation, the couple remained for the next five years, and the works Dove produced in Geneva are among his best.  It was during this period that he renewed his focus on nature and reveled in his rural surroundings.  In the catalogue for the spring 1937 exhibition of Dove’s work at An American Place, author William Einstein described the artist’s recent works as "truly American.  His form and colors ring ‘American’ and … his orchestration is American."   

He continued:

If one can be sufficiently free to be able to enjoy only the color in Dove–for in his originality and harmony he is certainly one of the great colorists of today—one will at least have an introduction—a chance to experience the deeper human values that Dove carries from himself into his paintings.

Armed with a small sketchpad and watercolors, Dove combined a strong palette rooted in his environment with a forceful pen and ink line.  "The resulting vignettes reveal how the artist's eye and brush could roam freely across sagging barn roofs, along limbs and lintels, swelling around haystacks in a single stroke.  By 1935 Dove was able to imbue his paintings with his new combination of abstraction and automatic movement."  

In Red Barn (The Slaughter House), the undulating lines of the driveway and the rooflines add a whimsical quality and movement to an already colorful work.  Forgoing the formal rigidity typically found in architecture, Dove delights in bringing the barn to life, in part because of the strength in the meandering black ink outline.  At the center of the composition, like the eye of a large whale, the barn peers back at the viewer through the one broken pane of its window.  

Duncan Phillips, a long-time devoted patron and supporter of the artist, presented this work in 1937 (the year it was executed) to Elmira Bier, a woman who worked for the Phillips Collection for forty-nine years and who, over the years, served in a variety of capacities, including personal secretary to Phillips.