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Charles Linford

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Charles Linford

American, (1846–1897)
Born in Pittsburgh, Charles Linford (1846 - 1897) remained in that city for the first thirty years of his life. His earliest artistic training was with George Hetzel who was an important landscape and still life painter in the city and founder of the Scalp Level School of landscape painters. While still an amateur painter, Linford was admitted to the "Gillespie Group," a loosely knit collection of artists who met daily at Gillespie's Gallery downtown to discuss art and art theory. Linford is credited with being the first artist to discover the possibilities for sketching nature at Scalp Level, a small town near Johnstown that became a favorite retreat for local artists seeking to escape industrialized Pittsburgh.
Like his colleagues, Linford painted out-of-doors and is best known as a landscape painter. He favored birch trees in his compositions, drawing from the great stands of birch trees which no longer dot the landscape of Southwestern Pennsylvania. A follower of the French Barbizon painter, Camille Corot, Linford was a close observer of nature in intimate settings. He left Pittsburgh for Philadelphia in 1877 where he exhibited almost every year at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts' Annual Exhibition until 1893. He also exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York and, in 1896, exhibited two landscape paintings at the first Carnegie International in his native Pittsburgh.
The Afterglow is a dramatic painting of sunset in the woods and seems symbolic of man's encroachment on nature with the inclusion of a rutted dirt road that leads the viewer's eye deep into the forested interior. The setting sum bathes the scene in a luminous red light that echoes its title.


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