The title of An Anniversary, 1929-21, suggests an event, as do the gestures of the old man and the man with his arm outstretched at the top of the pyramid formed by the picture's three principal figures. But, as in Interior, the densely packed figures appear unaware of each other and the gestures do not contribute to a unified narrative. Only the young, seated woman appears aware of the viewer. Likewise, the objects strung across the bottom of the painting have no narrative purpose. By undermining any coherent narrative, Dickinson frees the observer to experience the picture in terms of its mood and formal interplay and its suggestion of memories evoked by the title (anniversaries were important to Dickinson, who conscientiously noted in his journals the anniversaries of births and deaths of relatives, dear friends, and persons he greatly admired—including Beethoven, Bach, and Proust), as well as Civil War Battles and other major events).
The dark moodiness of the picture make it clear that the title can only refer to an anniversary of a death, and Driscoll thought it was intended as a memorial to Herbert Groesbeck, the second anniversary of whose death occurred only three weeks after he began the painting—on his own birthday. He believes that the picture's content may have been colored, if not inspired, by Thomas Hardy's poem "An Anniversary," which declares anniversaries to be "the saddest days of the year" and by Milton's "Lycidas", a poem that Dickinson memorized about this time and often quoted. Milton's subject was the death of a young friend of great promise, as was Dickinson's brother Burgess, and the fear of dying before one's work is done, which Driscoll identifies as also the underlying meaning of Dickinson's painting. The presence of sheet music on the floor and stringed instruments—a violin held by the right hand of the man behind the old man's head and a violin or viola (both of which Dickinson played) held behind his head in the left hand of the standing man—again suggest that Dickinson felt an equivance in the play of forms to musical rhythms and harmonies. The fact that neither the instruments nor the music are used suggests that the music in the painting is expressed through the visual play of form and does not require a representation of playing musicians.
O'Connor sees an overriding theme, pertaining to his father's remarriage to a much younger woman following his mother's death, in the symbolical pictures from 1920 to 1928 and in one begun the following year. He interprets the old man in An Anniversary, Two Figures II, The Cello Player, and The Fossil Hunters, and the androgynous woman in Woodland Scene as his aged father, associated in four of the paintings with a young woman and with the cello substituting for a woman in the fifth. The underlying idea that O'Connor proposes is that Edwin, unable in his poverty to marry until 1928, envies his father's happiness and sees him as a rival symbolically laid to rest in The Fossil Hunters by his own new love and marriage less than two months after work on the painting ended. O'Connor argues that the psychological resolution that Dickinson found in The Fossil Hunters he is unable to achieve in Woodland Scene because the symbolic references in it "are to old oedipal states once powerful enough to unify a painting, but now dissipated by his own new and fruitful life."
Read more about this topic: Edwin Dickinson