South Room - Green Street

1920

Daniel Garber

Artist, American, 1880 - 1958

Backlit from sunlight pouring in through a tall window, a girl with waist-length, golden hair stands reading looking at a sheet of paper in profile, facing a person sitting in a chair in front of the window in the corner of the room in this vertical painting. Both people seem to have light skin though their faces are obscured by shadow. The window on the wall opposite us is to our left of center. The sheer curtain covering the window is painted loosely with strokes of lavender purple, pale peach, and cream white. Floral curtains flanking the window are painted with touches of teal and pumpkin orange. The top of the window is covered by a shade that glows marigold-orange in the sunlight, and the rails separating the windowpanes cast aquamarine-blue shadows on the sheer curtain. The standing girl tilts her head down to look at the unfolded piece of paper she holds. The hair from her forehead and down to her ears is pinned back, adding to the cascade down her back. She wears a short-sleeved, shin-length, topaz-blue, loose garment and dark slippers or shoes. She has pulled her right foot, farther from us, out of the slipper to rest on those toes. The woman across from her, to our left, sits in a wicker chair and looks up at the girl. Her brown hair is pulled back and she wears a pale, butter-yellow wrap around her shoulders. One hand rests along the arm of her chair and the other, farther from us, the pages of a book or newspaper. Her chair is tucked in next to a royal-blue couch that has a rounded back and wood trim, next to an armless wooden chair with a red upholstered seat. The girl stands behind a wooden tabletop that extends off the canvas to our right. A mirror hanging on the wall over the seated woman reflects the light from the window, and another mirror behind the girl reflects the far side of her head. The light from the window pours onto an area rug patterned with touches of sand brown, coral pink, turquoise, and white. The artist signed the painting with tiny letters in the lower right corner: “Daniel Garber.”
This object’s media is not available for download. Contact us about image usage.

A prominent Pennsylvania Impressionist, Daniel Garber was best known for his landscapes, but the artist also made a number of figure studies and interiors that brought him considerable recognition, South Room – Green Street was one such painting. One of several paintings Garber made that featured his family members in their home, South Room – Green Street is the largest and most ambitious of the series.

The painting depicts Garber's wife, Mary Franklin Garber, and daughter Tanis in the front parlor of their Philadelphia row house at 1819 Green Street. South Room – Green Street is a visual treatise on light, its effects on the objects and experiences of everyday life and, in turn, the perceptual responses these effects initiate. Specifically, Garber manipulates how light confounds substance, turning heavy curtains into stained glass, strands of hair into a golden aura, and the shadow of a wicker chair into a lacy design on the floor. Continuing this exploration of illusory modes of vision is Garber's inclusion of two mirrors in the painting, which not only provide another view of the girl's head but also reflect the light in intriguing ways. Critics of the time remarked on this: "the hair of the little girl standing near the window, with the light falling on it from three directions [is] cleverly managed with the aid of two mirrors, one in front and one at the side." The pleasant nature of Garber's domestic scene thus belies the complex issues of light, reflection, and vision that the artist so deftly manages in the painting.

Not on view See artworks now on view

Artwork overview

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Purchased from the artist December 1921 by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; acquired 2014 by the National Gallery of Art.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1921

  • Eighth Exhibition of Oil Paintings by Contemporary American Artists, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, December 1921-January 1922, no. 198.

  • Exhibition of Paintings by Daniel Garber, W.L. Lathrop, Joseph T. Pearson, Jr., Robert Spencer, Milch Galleries, New York, January-February 1921, no. 2.

  • Exhibition of Recent Paintings by Daniel Garber, Arlington Galleries, New York, March 1921, no. 20.

  • Twentieth Annual International Exhibition of Paintings, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, April-June 1921.

1922

  • Exhibition of Paintings by Daniel Garber, Robert Henri, Frederick J. Waugh, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 1922, no. 10.

  • Exhibition of Oil Paintings by Daniel Garber, Robert Henri, and Frederick J. Waugh, Art Club of Philadelphia, 18 November - 10 December 1922, no. 21.

1945

  • Daniel Garber Retrospective Exhibition: Paintings, Drawings, Etchings, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, 1945, no. 110.

1957

  • Twenty-fifth Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Oil Paintings, Corcoral Gallery of Art, Washington; Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio, 1957, no. 8.

  • Fifty Years at the Corcoran, Frye Museum, Seattle; University Museum, Arizona State College, Tempe; Quincy Art Club, Illinois; J.B. Speed Art Museum, Louisville; Service League of Port Arthur, Texas; Winston-Salem Public Library; Museum of Fine Arts, Little Rock; Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist Univesity, Dallas; Miami Beach Art Center; Kent State University Museum; Davenport Municipal Art Gallery, Iowa, 1957-1958, no catalogue.

1963

  • A Century and a Half of American Painting, Dulin Gallery of Art, Knoxville, 1963, no. 33.

1964

  • The Romantic Century, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 1964, no catalogue.

1981

  • Of Time and Place: American Figurative Art from the Corcoran Gallery, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; Cincinnati Art Museum; San Diego Museum of Art; University of Kentucky Art Museum, Lexington; Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga; Philbrook Art Center, Tulsa; Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Des Moines Art Center; Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL, 1981-1983, no. 38, repro.

1994

  • Masterworks of American Impressionism: Edward Redfield and the New Hope Group, James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, 1994, unpublished checklist.

1997

  • An American Tradition: Pennsylvania Impressionists, Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, Pennsylvania; Florence Griswold Msueum, Old Lyme; Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston; Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, 1997-1998, no catalogue.

1998

  • The Forty-Fifth Biennial: The Corcoran Collects, 1907–1998, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 17 July - 29 September 1998, unnumbered catalogue.

2002

  • The Gilded Cage: Views of American Women, 1873-1921, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 2002, unpublished checklist.

2003

  • The Impressionist Tradition in America, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 2004, unpublished checklist.

2007

  • Daniel Garber: Romantic Realist, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, 26 January - 8 April 2007, no. 35.

2013

  • American Journeys: Visions of Place, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 21 September 2013 - 28 September 2014, unpublished checklist.

Bibliography

2006

  • Humphries, Lance. Daniel Garber, Catalogue Raisonné. 2 vols. New York, 2006: 2:152-153, no. P422.

2011

  • Naeem, Asma. "Daniel Garber, South Room - Green Street" In Corcoran Gallery of Art: American Paintings to 1945. Edited by Sarah Cash. Washington, 2011: 222-223, 280, repro.

Inscriptions

lower right: Daniel Garber

Wikidata ID

Q20192321

You may be interested in

Loading Results