Autumn, c.1931 (oil on canvas)

Hugh Breckenridge taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, for forty-three years, numbering among his pupils Arthur B. Carles, Charles Demuth, and Henry Lyman Saÿen. Although firmly committed to the aesthetic principles of modernism throughout his career, it was only during the 1920s and 1930s that Breckenridge moved beyond a rather subdued version of American Impressionism toward chromatic abstraction. The intense colors and rapid, spontaneous brushwork used in Autumn are typical of this late, experimental phase in the artist's work.