WINSTON-SALEM, NC.- In honor of 50th anniversary of Reynolda House Museum of American Art’s volunteer program, Reynolda’s Founding President Barbara Babcock Millhouse generously contributed “Bow River” by Milton Avery to the Museum’s permanent collection.

“Bow River” was painted by Avery in 1947. He was described by fellow painter Mark Rothko as “a great poet-inventor who had invented sonorities never seen nor heard before . . . His is the poetry of sheer loveliness, of sheer beauty.” Avery was born in 1885 in Altmar, NY as the son of a tanner. For most of his life, he sustained his immediate and extended family through manual labor while he and his wife, Sally Michel Avery, a painter and illustrator in her own right, created modernist works in near obscurity.

Avery sold his first painting in 1929 to the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., which also gave him his first solo exhibition in 1944. In the 1930s, the Averys moved to New York City and formed friendships with other modernists such as Rothko, Barnett Newman and Adolph Gottlieb. Avery’s radiant colors and simplified forms influenced the abstract painters of the 1950s. He became ever bolder in his later years, painting canvases up to six feet wide with an ever-greater reduction in forms, approaching near total abstraction. Art historian Robert Hobbs, in his book “Milton Avery: The Late Paintings,” cited 1947—the year of “Bow River”—as the beginning of the artist’s fruitful final period.

Art critic Hilton Kramer wrote that, “Landscape was always, I believe, Avery’s greatest subject—the subject, that is, that allowed him to create his purest, most inspired paintings.” In “Bow River,” Avery was inspired by the main headstream for the South Saskatchewan River in southern Alberta, Canada.

In Avery’s painting, the river is viewed from a grassy slope. Within the steady current, suggested by columns of thin, white wave crests, there are two sandy islands dotted with spindly conifers. On the far bank, another six evergreen trees keep a tenuous hold in a delta of sand. Their teetering forms are reminders of the arctic winds that blow through the river valley. On this day, however, the air is calm; fog suspended in a distant valley. Oddly shaped areas of pasture on the distant mountain provide the only hints of human presence in the landscape.

“Avery was a major 20th-century modernist, and we are delighted to have ‘Bow River’ as part of our permanent collection,” said Allison Perkins, executive director of Reynolda House and Reynolda Gardens. “Barbara Babcock Millhouse’s donation of this painting is a fitting tribute to our volunteers who have been an essential part of the Reynolda experience. Their dedication, passion and hard work continue to enhance our organization and the visitor experience. They’ve remained loyal through every bend, or bow, in the river, and we can’t thank them often enough nor deeply enough.”

Barbara Babcock Millhouse is the granddaughter of Richard Joshua Reynolds and Katharine Smith Reynolds, and daughter of Mary Reynolds and Charles Babcock. She was the driving force behind the establishment of the Reynolda House art collection and the formation of the Museum. Under her guidance, the nationally recognized collection has grown to include masterworks of American painting, sculpture, and photography by such artists as Mary Cassatt, Frederic Church, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O’Keeffe and Gilbert Stuart.