Alfred Thompson Bricher
Alfred Thompson Bricher (1837-1908)
Alfred Thompson Bricher was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and three years later his family moved to Newburyport, Massachusetts. In 1851 he arrived in Boston where, for seven years he earned a living as a clerk in a dry-goods store while practicing his art in his spare time. He opened a studio as a professional painter above Merchant's Bank on State Street in 1859, and that summer, while visiting Mount Desert Island, he met artists Charles Temple Dix and William S. Haseltine. Bricher had several studios in Boston between 1861 and 1868, when he moved to New York, where he maintained a studio until his death. In 1881 he married Alice Robinson of Southampton, where he summered for the next decade. In 1890 he built a home at New Dorp, on Staten Island.
Bricher’s earliest paintings are landscapes of the Catskills and the White Mountains; he continued to paint landscapes, though with decreasing interest, into the 1870s. He briefly visited the Mississippi River in Minnesota and Wisconsin in 1866, Halifax in 1874, and England's Cornwall coast about 1874. However, the scenes of the eastern coast, from New Jersey to Grand Manan, New Brunswick, for which he is best known became his primary focus by about 1870.
Bricher presented his work at major and secondary annual exhibitions in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and throughout the Midwest and was also successful in developing a commercial network to promote and sell his work. He was a member of the American Water Color Society and an associate of the National Academy of Design.
Sunrise (formerly Beach Scene at Sunset), ca. 1880-85
Oil on canvas, 22 x 32 in. (55.9 x 81.3 cm)
Signed (lower left): ATB [conjoined monogram] RICHER
Gift of Howard H. Bristol Jr. (1979.11)
Bricher roamed and sketched on the beaches of the East Coast from New Jersey, New York and Long Island, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine to Mount Desert and Grand Manan, New Brunswick. Beginning in the early 1860s he explored the effects of light and weather at different times of day in views looking over waves toward the horizon. During the first half of the 1870s he created a coherent group of these views, primarily along the shores of Narragansett Bay, using a silvery Luminist manner or with the warmer palettes of dawn and sunset. He took up the subject again from the 1880s until 1892.
After 1881 Bricher maintained a home at Southampton, on the eastern end of Long Island, and for a decade painted the environs--perhaps the source of Sunrise. The artist's focus, however, on the effects of light and weather was not dependent on place, and the occasional reference to a location in a title may have had more to do with the marketing of a souvenir of a summer experience than with the depiction of a specific site.
In “Sunrise” the mood of serenity is enhanced by the velvety stillness of the morning sky. As is characteristic of his work of the 1880s, Bricher's touch is painterly and his palette sensitive to nuances of color when treating the surf, sky, and reflections. A constant observer of the effects of winds, weather, and tide, he could catch the movement of surging waves and sea foam propelled by the breeze toward the shore or against the direction of waves and currents.
The artist's scrapbook containing published illustrations of his work includes only two line drawings of this type of subject: “A Foamy Wave”, a canvas at the National Academy of Design in 1888, and a watercolor entitled “Sunrise” shown at the American Watercolor Society in 1889. Similar to the New Britain oil, the watercolor depicts a three-masted schooner to the right of center on the horizon and the sun rising into the sky with diagonal bands of clouds.
JRB
Bibliography:
Alfred Thompson Bricher Papers, 1860-1892, microfilm, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Jeffrey R. Brown and Ellen W. Lee, “Alfred Thompson Bricher”, exhib. cat. (Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1973); Daniel Edward Sachs, "Alfred Thompson Bricher and the Social Implications of Romantic Images of the American Victorian Summer Watering Place," Ph.D. diss, Case Western Reserve University, 1996.
