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This is one of three paintings that Garber produced in the late 1920s near Brownsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Garber liked the "stark quality" of the setting, and the work's spareness and simplicity creates a sense of mystery.

Garber, an Indiana native, was closely associated with the New Hope art colony in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. 

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Daniel Garber

Pioneer’s House, about 1929

oil on canvas

30 ½ x 30 in.

James E. Roberts Fund

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Daniel Garber was born in 1880 to a Mennonite farm family near North Manchester, Indiana. He eventually settled in Pennsylvania, where he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under William Merritt Chase. He was awarded a fellowship that allowed him to study in England, France and Italy. When he returned in 1909, he became a faculty member of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he taught painting and drawing for the next 41 years and won numerous awards for his own work. Garber was known as one of the leaders of the Pennsylvania Impressionists, or the New Hope School, as the group was called. He depicted the quarries, woods and Delaware River Valley of Bucks County, Pennsylvania. His home near Lumberville was not far from the great stone quarries at Byram, New Jersey, which he often painted. Like most Impressionists, Garber painted out of doors directly from nature. These patterned scenes were dominated by blues, greens and yellows

In Pioneer’s House the quarry rises behind the structure, dwarfing it, while the trees almost obliterate the home’s exterior. The artist used the rounded shapes of the quarry, the vertical elements of the spreading trees and the rigid geometry of the house to create a scene of strongly contrasting forms.

Reference 

Brian H. Peterson.  Pennsylvania Impressionism, Philadelphia: James A Michener Art Museum and University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. ISBN 0-8122-3700-5.

Lance Humphries.  Daniel Garber: His Life and Work, New York. Hollis Taggart Galleries, 2006. N6537.G37 H86.