Robert Newton Hurley’s Red Barns is an elegant and quietly radiant prairie winter landscape, distilled into the pure geometry and luminous colour for which the Saskatchewan painter is known. Against an immense sky—layered in soft bands of pale blue, ice white, and gently shifting atmospheric tones—the buildings sit low on the horizon, emphasizing the vastness and silence of the open plains.

Hurley arranges the farmstead in a striking chromatic trio: two vivid red barns anchoring the right and centre, balanced by a brilliant yellow farmhouse that glows like a pocket of warmth within the cold expanse. A tall red silo rises beside the main barn, adding a vertical counterpoint to the painting’s long horizontal sweep.

The snow-covered fields, composed of sweeping washes and rhythmic violet-brown grass strokes, show Hurley’s disciplined understanding of watercolour: transparent, economical, yet full of movement. A narrow path, rendered in cool blues and casting soft shadows, leads the viewer directly into the cluster of buildings, guiding the eye from foreground to horizon.

Hurley’s late-period work often emphasizes simplicity, structure, and clarity, and Red Barns is a perfect example—quiet, contemplative, and unmistakably Prairie Modernist in sensibility. It captures not only a place, but a way of seeing: spacious, crisp, and suffused with winter light.