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Alfred Thompson Bricher

Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Bricher began painting part-time at the Lowell Institute while he pursued a business career in Boston. He turned to painting full-time in 1858, working in Boston and Newburyport, Massachusetts. In 1871, he moved to Staten Island, New York, where he remained for the rest of his life, painting oils and watercolors along the New England coast during the summer months. In 1973, the Indianapolis Museum of Art mounted a retrospective exhibition, Alfred Thompson Bricher, 1837-1908, with a catalogue by Jeffrey R. Brown.

Biography courtesy of Schwarz Gallery, www.antiquesandfineart.com/schwarzphila

The rugged cliffs of Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick, with the dramatic tides of the Bay of Fundy and the quiet coastal inlets at low tide were favorite subjects of A.T. Bricher. His works appeared in the major exhibitions of the late nineteenth century and were known through illustrations for Harper's New Monthly Magazine and the popular chromolithographs of Louis Prang.

Throughout his career, Bricher remained a conservative painter. He was particularly influenced by such artists as John F. Kensett, a Hudson River school painter who inspired his interest in capturing effects of light and atmoshere. The looser handling of paint in his later works shows the influence of the Barbizon painters. F. Kensett, a Hudson River

Bricher was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1837 and spent his childhood in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where he attended school. Later, he worked as a clerk in a Boston drygoods store and painted in his spare time. He may have studied art at Lowell Institute in Boston during the mid-fifties; although an 1875 article in the Art Journal states that during his early years in Boston, Bricher had little contact with other artists and was "entirely self-taught" (p. 340). The same article says that William Stanley Haseltine and Charles temple Dix (1840-1873), whom Bricher met in 1858 while sketching on Mount Desert Island, Maine had a decisive influence on his style. Haseltine's paintings of sunstruck, fissured rocks on the New England coast may have prompted Bricher to turn from landscapes to marine paintings in which large rocks dominate the foreground. He probably also knew the marine and still-life painter Martin Johnson Heade, who worked in Newburyport during the early 1860's. In addition to painting on the New England coast, Bricher went on sketching trips to the White Mountains and the Catskills and in 1866 to the upper Mississippi River and Minnesota. Bricher moved to New York in 1868. During the 1870's, he occupied a studio in the YMCA Building. He was a member of the American Society of Painters in Water Colors and an associate of the National Academy of Design. In 1882, while maintaining a studio in New York, he built a summer home in Southampton, Long Island, to be closer to the sea. From 1890 until his death in 1908, he lived in New Dorp, Staten Island.

Public Collections:
Indianapolis Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Biography courtesy of Roughton Galleries, www.antiquesandfineart.com/roughton

Bricher's subtle and serene style classifies him as the premier painter of light-enshrined landscapes and seascapes. Ranked among such notable luminists as Martin Johnson Heade and John Frederick Kensett, Bricher is especially known for his coastal scenes painted in Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Long Island between 1870 and 1890. Bricher exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Boston Athenaeum, the Brooklyn Art Association, and the Boston Art Club. Today, his paintings can be seen at The White House, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection in Madrid.

Biography courtesy of Questroyal Fine Art LLC, www.antiquesandfineart.com/questroyal

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