Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night (December 1917): Art, History and Details

Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night (December 1917) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Charles Burchfield (American, 1893–1967).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Burchfield considered this drawing among the greatest accomplishments of his “golden year.” This period followed a time of self-doubt and uncertainty: after graduating from the Cleveland School of Art, Burchfield enrolled in the National Academy of Design in New York City, but dropped out after one day, returning to Salem to work an office job. He painted inexhaustibly during his breaks and at night, depicting Salem and its environs in an increasingly abstract style. Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night shows the spire of Salem’s Baptist church rising up between two houses. Burchfield hoped to express his powerful childhood fear of the bell’s ominous ring—which he described as “a dull roar . . . dying slowly & with a growl.” Hearing it on stormy winter nights, he huddled in his bed and calmed himself by thinking of Christmas, a practice suggested by the tree visible through a window in the drawing. Burchfield carefully refined the composition throughout the sketches seen in this gallery. The drawing’s mood is conveyed through gray tones and the buildings’ hulking forms. Burchfield also created a complex language of symbols entitled “Conventions for Abstract Thoughts,” that recurred throughout his work and represented universal emotions. The hooked forms surrounding the tower stood for “Fear,” for example, and the shapes of the houses’ doors and windows symbolize “Morbidness” and “Evil.” Developed fully in this drawing, these symbols dominated Burchfield’s work during the remaining several years he spent in Ohio.

Object facts

• Title: Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night
• Date: December 1917
• Creator attribution: Charles Burchfield (American, 1893–1967)
• Culture: America
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: watercolor and gouache over graphite on wove paper
• Dimensions: Sheet: 77.2 x 50 cm (30 3/8 x 19 11/16 in.); Secondary Support: 77.5 x 50 cm (30 1/2 x 19 11/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - American 20th Century
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1949.544

A detail from the museum

Salem's Baptist Church, a central feature of Burchfield's composition, has since been destroyed by fire.

Collection credit

Gift of Mrs. Louise M. Dunn in memory of Henry G. Keller

Further reading listed by the museum

• Charles Burchfield: Early Watercolors 1916 to 1918. Exh. Cat. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1930.
• Burroughs, Alan. Limners and Likenesses: Three Centuries of American Painting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936.
• Watson, Forbes. American Painting Today. Washington, D.C.: American Federation of Arts, 1939.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.