Alfred Thompson Bricher
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Alfred Thompson Bricher
(1837–1908). Painter. Specializing almost exclusively in Atlantic coastal views, he created light-filled, horizontal scenes of beaches, cliffs, and sea, usually recording locations along the shores of New England and Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick. Clear and simple spatial organization, meticulously observed rocks and waves, and sharp attention to effects of atmospheric light demonstrate ties to luminism. Evoking idyllic seaside vacations, Bricher's vistas generally disregard nature's perilous and stupendous aspects. Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, but raised in Newburyport, Massachusetts, as a teenager he went to work in Boston. Although largely self-taught as a painter, he found inspiration in an encounter with William Stanley Haseltine in 1858. Undoubtedly profiting also from precedents in the work of Fitz Hugh Lane and Martin Johnson Heade, Bricher may have known them personally. In his early years as an artist, he followed the example of Hudson River School artists in visiting the Catskills and White Mountains, and in 1866 he journeyed along the Mississippi River into Wisconsin and Minnesota. He moved permanently to New York in the late 1860s. In the 1880s he had a summer home at Southampton and in these years often painted the shores and inlets of Long Island. From 1890 he made his home on Staten Island, in New Dorp, where he died.
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Alfred Thompson Bricher
Alfred Thompson Bricher (born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on April 10, 1837; died in Staten Island, New York on September 30, 1908) was a painter associated with White Mountain art and the Hudson River School.
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Life and work
He was educated in an academy at Newburyport, Massachusetts. He began his career as a businessman in Boston, Massachusetts. When not working, he studied at the Lowell Institute. He also studied with Albert Bierstadt, William Morris Hunt, and others. He attained noteworthy skill in making landscape studies from nature, and after 1858 devoted himself to the art as a profession. He opened a studio in Boston, and met with some success there. In 1868 he moved to New York City, and at the National Academy of Design that year he exhibited “Mill-Stream at Newburyport.” Soon afterward he began to use watercolors in preference to oils, and in 1873 was chosen a member of the American Watercolor Society. In the 1870s, he primarily did maritime themed paintings, with attention to watercolor paintings of landscape, marine, and coastwise scenery.[1][2]
Hudson River School
Bircher was one of the last painters of the famed Hudson River School. By the end of his life, his style of painting that included landscapes and luminism fell out of style, with Modern Art becoming the premier artistic movement. As his style of art faded, so did his fame.
Rediscovery
Over time Bircher's artwork garnered more attention and by the 1980s he began to be credited as one of the nineteenth century's greatest maritime painters. A self taught luminist, he explored the effects of light and how it reflected, refracted, and absorbed on landscapes and seascapes.
Later life
As a lover of maritime life and the sea he purchased a home in the 1890s close to the sea in the New Dorp section of Staten Island where he had views of the Atlantic Ocean and Raritan Bay. He lived and painted at the shore in New Dorp until his death in 1908.[3]
References
- ^ White Mountain art site
- ^
"Bricher, Alfred Thompson". Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. 1900. - ^ http://www.nypl.org/branch/staten/index2.cfm?Trg=1&d1=1391 Staten Island on the Web: Famous Staten Islanders
External links
Media related to Alfred Thompson Bricher at Wikimedia Commons- Gallery
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Oxford Dictionary of American Art and Artists
The Oxford Dictionary of American Art and Artists. © 2007
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