Alfred Thompson Bricher | Biography | Hollis Taggart Galleries

Alfred Thompson Bricher (1937-1908)

Alfred Thompson Bricher was one of America’s best-known landscape and marine painters of the nineteenth century. Unlike the artists of the two generations preceding his, who sought untamed wilderness views in the Catskill Mountains, the White Mountains, and the Adirondacks, Bricher specialized in landscapes featuring placid inland bodies of water and picturesque scenes of the New England seaboard. Today Bricher is widely appreciated by art historians for his mastery of Luminist realism alongside the slightly older generation of Hudson River School painters Fitz Hugh Lane, Sanford R. Gifford, Martin Johnson Heade, and John F. Kensett.

Bricher was born in the seafaring town of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on April 10, 1837, and spent most of his childhood along the Atlantic seaboard at Newburyport, Massachusetts. In 1851 he began working at a Boston dry goods store—not an inauspicious start for a budding painter in an age when artistic success itself could depend in no small part upon one’s mercantilist talents. It is thought that Bricher studied art concurrently at Boston’s Lowell Institute, and he later maintained that painters William Stanley Haseltine (1835–1900) and Charles Temple Dix (1838–1873), whom he met on a summer sketching trip to Mount Desert, Maine, in 1858, greatly influenced his developing talent.

By the mid-1860s Bricher had established himself as an artist in Boston, where he had set up a studio in the same building as Martin Johnson Heade. Not unlike Heade and other American landscapists of the day, Bricher made frequent trips inland and along the coast in order to sketch—usually in pen-and-ink or watercolor—various motifs from nature for later translation into oil paintings, which he would subsequently work up in the studio. As an example of how diligently he studied nature, certain Bricher sketches include notations specifying the exact atmospheric effects of a passing moment. Such field research had an especially profitable outcome when, in 1866, Bricher arranged to have his oil paintings translated into color lithographs by the Boston firm of L. Prang & Company, with whom he maintained a lucrative relationship for the rest of his life.

Bricher became known early on for his autumnal landscapes, a uniquely American subject—as Thomas Cole, Jasper Cropsey and other painters had discovered. Bricher found the settings for his displays of warm fall colors among the bays, creeks, and meadows of Newburyport. Mill Stream at Newburyport, Massachusetts, exhibited at the National Academy of Design, New York, in 1869, is one such example, in which a quiet pond framed by overarching trees forms a placid setting for three women in a boat, which Bricher placed smartly in the left background as though to satisfy a growing popular demand at this time for paintings of figures in landscape.

After marrying and establishing himself professionally in New York City in 1868, Bricher increasingly devoted his time to marine painting. From that time forward his palette was dominated by cool greens and blues. In the 1870s he summered at Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick. In the early 1880s he was visiting fashionable summer watering spots and including in his paintings the graceful young women of the upper classes who frequented them. He was at New Rochelle, New York, the summer of 1880, and in 1881 he found himself at Larchmont, New York, as well as at points in New Jersey, such as Montclair, Asbury Park, and Atlantic City.

Throughout this time Bricher earned as much praise for his watercolors as for his oil paintings. He exhibited for the first time with the American Water Color Society in 1873, and as a consequence he was immediately elected to membership in the organization. In 1874 he enjoyed the distinction of having a watercolor included in the Exposition Universelle, Paris, among the American section. In 1879 Bricher was elected an Associate member of the National Academy of Design. His work was seen regularly in the annual exhibitions of both the Academy and the AWC. Bricher also exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Boston Art Club, and the gallery of James Gill in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Following a second marriage in 1881, Bricher built a summer home and studio at Southampton, Long Island (his wife’s childhood region). By 1884 he had eliminated the human figure from many of his landscape paintings, preferring to render unpopulated, rugged views of the coast near Montauk Point (1882–1885) as well as the expansive coast and quaint villages of Long Island’s south shore (1886–1891). Throughout the 1880s up to his death, Bricher painted the Atlantic coast at various sites in Maine, Grand Manan Island, Long Island, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. He later made his home at New Dorp, Staten Island, while maintaining a studio in New York City until the end of his life. By that date, 1908, Bricher’s career had spanned a period of momentous evolution in American art, indeed from the era of the Hudson River School to the imminent appearance of Synchromism, or color abstraction. It is little wonder, then, that when Bricher died at New Dorp on September 30, 1908, his obituary in Art News (November 21, 1908) commented, “[Bricher] did not receive the notice in the press that the artist’s ability and reputation deserved"—a sentiment shared by today’s finest scholars of American nineteenth-century painting.

Today works by Bricher are to be found in the permanent collections of many of America’s most prestigious museums, most notable among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Wadsworth Atheneum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the White House, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Denver Art Museum.