William Bradford

William Bradford was born in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, across the harbor from New Bedford, center of the New England whaling industry. His parents, Hannah Kempton and Melvin Bradford, were Quakers. His father encouraged him to join the family business, ship outfitters in a drygoods store, but Bradford preferred art to commerce and at the age of thirty began to devote himself to painting. He initially specialized in ship portraiture and, like the Gloucester painter Fitz Hugh Lane, developed a style based on careful draftsmanship, meticulous detail, and a cool even light. During the mid-1850s Bradford studied with the Dutch marine painter Albert van Beest, who moved to New Bedford and gave lessons in exchange studio space. Under van Beest's tutelage, Bradford's work became more painterly and dynamic.

Bradford's interest in the Arctic developed early in his career. He avidly read such travel books as Elisha Kent Kane's Arctic Explorations (1856) and embarked on his own Arctic expeditions in 1861. Like Albert Bierstadt in the American West and Frederic Church in South America, Bradford roamed the frozen North in search of exotic landscape subjects. The photographs and sketches he produced on his journeys provided him with material on which to base his painted compositions when he returned.

Bradford's final and most extensive Arctic journey took him as far as Greenland in 1869. This expedition prompted his own publication The Arctic Regions (1873), a book of 125 photographs with personal commentary, as well as a commission from Queen Victoria for the painting The Panther off the Coast of Greenland under the Midnight Sun (1873; Royal Collection, London). Bradford was elected an associate of the National Academy of Design and settled in the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York in 1874. He continued to produce Arctic landscapes and to lecture on his travels--using lantern slides of his photographs and paintings--until his death in 1892.