Born in 1893 in Ashtabula Harbor, Ohio, Charles Burchfield was drawn to observing the natural world since his youth. He attended the Cleveland School of Art, studying with Ohio watercolorist Henry G. Keller.

Burchfield relocated to Buffalo, New York in 1921, taking a job as a designer for a wallpaper company. After befriending Edward Hopper in 1928, and gaining gallery representation by the Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries in New York in 1928, Burchfield began painting full-time. His transcendental landscapes received critical acclaim. His paintings were the subject of a 1930 solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art called Charles Burchfield: Early Watercolors 1916 - 1918. 

Throughout his career, Burchfield worked mainly in watercolor - combining realism and mysticism to create fantastical paintings of his surroundings. Although often considered a regionalist landscape painter, Burchfield's work explores an inner relationship to the external world - heightening the mysterious nature of the everyday.