Toledo

As a painter and printmaker, commercial artist, teacher, and collector, Earl (also spelled Earle) Horter helped to introduce modern art to Philadelphia. This brilliant draftsman received a silver medal for his prints at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. During the 1920s he began to paint, showing his oils and watercolors at the Pennsylvania Academy's annual exhibitions. His knowledge of modernism was enhanced by his own activity as a collector; in 1934 his collection included seventeen Picassos, as well as works by Brancusi, Duchamp, Braque and Matisse. Horter painted several images of the Spanish medieval city of Toledo in oils and watercolors. Like the Spanish Baroque master El Greco, Horter exaggerated the height and thinness of the city's fortifications; darker tones draw our eyes to the central towers at the river's edge and in the distance. However, Horter's watercolor also reveals his interest in Cubism, notably in the square planes and simplified forms and volumes. Horter's incomplete edges allow one plane to merge with another and complicate the spatial relationships among the buildings and the stark landscape. Through these techniques Horter analyzed the city as a play of form and space represented on the flat picture plane.