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Alfred Thompson Bricher


Birth Year : 1837
Death Year : 1908
Country : US

Alfred Thompson Bricher was an American painter who specialized in marine subjects, with particular emphasis on subjects from Maine, the Bay of Fundy, and the Maritime provinces of Canada. Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Bricher grew up in

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Newburyport, Massachusetts. As a young man, he worked as a clerk in Boston while studying painting, in which he was largely self-taught (although there is some evidence that he studied formally at Boston's Lowell Institute). In 1858, during a sketching trip to Mount Desert Island in Maine, Bricher met the artists William Stanley Haseltine and Charles Temple Dix,
who had a important impact on his developing style; Haseltine's paintings of the dramatic coastal rocks of New England inspired Bricher to begin painting marine and coastal subjects. Bricher also took sketching trips to the White Mountains, the Catskills, and the Mississippi River. His works began to appear in major exhibitions, and he developed a large popular following with many illustrations for Harper's New Monthly Magazine.

Bricher was often associated with the group of painters known as "the Hudson River School". He espoused a conservative and realistic approach to landscapes, while his interests lay not only in the play of light, water, and air, but in a sense of luminosity and spirituality in nature. In 1868 Bricher moved to New York City, where he worked in a studio in the YMCA Building; in 1882 he built a house in Southampton, Long Island, where he was able more closely to observe the sea. During the later part of his career, Bricher witnessed the advent of modernism, a movement that seemed to make many of his artistic concerns obsolete - but which, in another sense, owed a debt to the discipline and realism in works by Bricher and other Hudson River painters. From 1890 until his death in 1908, Bricher lived in New Dorp, Staten Island. He is still considered one of the best maritime painters of the late nineteenth century.



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