Edward Redfield. Edward Willis Redfield was an American Impressionist landscape painter and member of the art colony at New Hope, Pennsylvania.
He is best known today for his impressionist scenes of the New Hope area, often depicting the snow-covered countryside. He also spent his summers on Boothbay Harbor, Maine, where he interpreted the local coastline.
He frequently painted Maine's Monhegan Island. Redfield was born in 1869 in Bridgeville, Delaware.
He showed artistic talent at an early age, and from 1887 to 1889 studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. His teachers at the Academy included Thomas Anshutz, James Kelly and Thomas Hovenden.
Anshutz maintained the teaching methods of Thomas Eakins, which focused on an intense study of the nude as well as on human anatomy. While at the Academy, Redfield met Robert Henri, who was later to become an important American painter and teacher, and the two became lifelong friends. His other Academy friends included the sculptors Charles Grafly and Alexander Sterling Calder. Redfield and Robert Henri traveled to France and studied at the Academie Julian and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. At both French art academies, he studied with William Adolphe Bouguereau, one of the leading and best-known French academic painters. In Europe, Redfield admired the work of impressionist painters Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Norwe