Description
Grain Fields
Edwin Evans, 1890
A native of Lehi, Utah, Evans left for France at age thirty to study art. Soon after arriving, Evans joined a small group of Utah painters whose Paris art studies were being financed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In exchange for the art training, these artists painted murals in the Salt Lake City temple upon return to Utah. This dazzling outdoor scene painted in France won an honorable mention at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
Like many American artists at French academies, Evans sought relief from the studio routine by painting in the countryside during the summer months. The sheaves and haystacks lead our eye back to the field worker and farmhouse on the horizon line. Grain Fields exhibits Impressionist color and light but retains an emphasis on an orderly composition.
This piece was displayed in both the American Dreams and The First 100 Years exhibitions.
What’s Going On?
The image is a landscape in which the foreground consists of a freshly harvested field with sheaves of grain leaning in teepee-like mounds throughout the field. In the rear of the field a female figure is on the left in front of a mound. A second field to the left and behind is still unharvested. Beyond the fields, to the left of the center, trees surround a grouping of structures. The flat fields continue into the distance with trees dotting the horizon line.
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