Clarence Holbrook Carter Landscape Paintings

A watercolor painting by Clarence Holbrook Carter circa 1950. Carter's modernist style utilizes strong structural lines and architectural aesthetics to form almost surreal-like scene...

Trees at Bloom, 1939, oil on canvas, 32 x 24 inches, signed lower right About the Painting Trees at Bloom was painted when Clarence Holbrook Carter lived in Pittsburgh and served as an instructor in the Department of Painting and Design at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University), a position he held from 1938 through 1944. It depicts a thick forest at the base of distance hills just outside the city. During his tenure in Pittsburgh, Carter was deeply influenced by not only the industrial might of the steel mills and iron forges of the city, but also the beauty of the surrounding landscape. As Frank Anderson Trapp noted in his book on the artist, for Carter “the terrain itself had its own special vitality, with its craggy, wooded hills threaded with ravine and watercourses . . . . the signs of industrial blight that were unalleviated in some parts of the country were there relieved by the geological variety of the parent landscape, and by the irrepressible presence of its natural growth, which softened the whole.” Trapp continues, “in his scenes of rural situations, Carter had a special gift for rendering those elements convincingly.” With the profusion of flowering trees which diffuse the light and the red cardinals darting from one branch to another, Trees at Bloom portrays the “irrepressible presence of nature” that Trapp describes. About the Artist Together with Charles Burchfield, Clarence Holbrook Carter was Ohio’s premiere American Scene painter and later an innovative magic realist. The son of a no-nonsense public-school administrator, Carter was born in 1904 outside of Portsmouth, Ohio, a small town in the heart of the Ohio River...

A watercolor painting by Clarence Holbrook Carter from 1955. Carter's modernist style utilizes strong structural lines and architectural aesthetics to form almost surreal-like scenes...

An acrylic painting by Clarence Holbrook Carter from 1979. Carter's modernist style utilizes strong structural lines and architectural aesthetics to form almost surreal-like scenes. Signed on lower right corner, framed in elegant silver wooden frame. Artist: Clarence Holbrook Carter, American (1904 - 1998) Title: Oil Well...

A watercolor painting by Clarence Holbrook Carter from 1953. Carter's modernist style utilizes strong structural lines and architectural aesthetics to form almost surreal-like scenes. Signed on lower right corner, framed in elegant silver wooden frame. Artist: Clarence Holbrook Carter, American (1904 - 1998) Title: On the Great Lakes...