The well-known nineteenth-century marine painter Alfred Thompson Bricher was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on April 10, 1837. Soon after, the Bricher family moved to Newburyport, Massachusetts where Alfred attended local schools. Upon his completion of school Bricher moved to Boston, where he was employed in a dry goods store in 1851 and possibly studied at the Lowell Institute. Seven years later, at the age of twenty-one, the largely self-taught artist opened a studio in Newburyport, Massachusetts and began his artistic career.
In the years that followed, Bricher traveled on sketching tours throughout New England. In the same year that he opened his studio, 1858, he visited Mt. Desert Island, Maine with his friend William Stanley Haseltine. By the next year, Bricher had abandoned his studio in Newburyport for a new studio in Boston. At the time, it was recorded that he had completed some twenty paintings of Long Island, New York, the Catskills, and the White Mountains. By 1864, the precocious young man was exhibiting at the Boston Athenaeum and sketching on the lower Hudson River as well as in the mountains of New Hampshire. In the mid-1860s, Bricher began to work closely with L. Prang & Company, a Boston business responsible for inventing the chromolithograph. The artist offered prints of his paintings through their catalogue.
In 1866, the adventurous Bricher, likely encouraged by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha,” traveled up the Mississippi River to Minnesota. At the time, this location represented a fresh, natural, and untamed wilderness which served as inspirational subject matter for visiting painters like John Frederick Kensett, Eastman Johnson, Albert Bierstadt, Robert S. Duncanson, and Bricher. This area proved especially attractive for these artists because of its similarities to the previously unspoiled Tappan Zee in the Catskill Mountains of New York.
By 1868, Bricher had moved his studio to 40 West 30th Street in New York City. This relocation soon paid off with the artist’s first exhibitions at the National Academy of Design and at the American Society of Painters in Water Colors. Bricher continued a close relationship with both of these organizations throughout his career, exhibiting with each until his death. In 1870, he also exhibited at the Brooklyn Art Association before travelling on sketching trips up and down the Hudson River and throughout New Hampshire. The following year, Bricher embraced the subject that he would become most recognized for, seascapes along the Atlantic coast, on Long Island, and at Narragansett, Rhode Island. The artist’s style of this period is represented in Time and Tide (1873, Private Collection), which was exhibited at the National Academy the same year of its completion, and exhibits the meticulous, luminous, accuracy employed to convey intense tranquility.
The 1870s were productive years for the artist. Bricher received favorable criticism in publications, donated works to the Artists Fund Society, was elected an Active Member of the American Society of Painters in Water Colors, illustrated for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, and experienced considerable commercial success through Gill’s Art Galleries of Springfield, Massachusetts. During this surge in his early career, Bricher, who was especially well read, embraced European ideals of aesthetics and transferred them into images of Esopus Creek, Gloucester, Narragansett, and New Hampshire. This resulted in stunning paintings such as Morning at Grand Manan (1878, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis) which capture both the transcendent and serene. In 1879, Bricher was elected an Associate Member of the National Academy of Design.
In the 1880s, Bricher traveled extensively throughout New England and New Brunswick, sketching both landscapes and seascapes. In 1880, the now firmly established artist was asked to join the New York Artists’ Fund Society on a drawing tour up the Erie Canal and ending at Niagara Falls. Possibly due to the economic hardships of the late 1870s, Bricher experimented in the early 1880s with genre painting for a short time. Paintings like Baby is King (1880, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco) were both popular and cost effective, and likely filled the emotional void that Bricher may have felt following his first brief marriage. In 1881, the year after completing this work, Bricher married Alice L. Robinson of Southampton, Long Island and began spending much of his time in this area. 1884 was very eventful for Bricher, as he joined the Art Union, exhibited at the Southern Exhibition, sold works at the American Art Association, and welcomed his daughter, Florence Boker Bricher. Although the artist registered a studio at 2 West 14th Street in New York City in 1886, he continued to sketch at places like Salisbury Beach, Massachusetts and eventually built his family home in New Dorp on Staten Island. In the same year that he moved to Staten Island, 1890, Bricher also executed a lengthy sketching trip to New Jersey, visiting Beach Haven, Toms River, and Monmouth Beach.
It was during the last decade of the 1800s that Bricher began to experience considerable commercial success. Exhibiting with the Schenck Art Gallery, in 1892 he sold some seventy-one watercolors and four oils for a total of $1,818.50. His reputation continued to be greatly supported when he exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago the next year. Although Bricher continued to experience popularity among the masses, he remained focused on natural scenic content, employing his skilled draftsmanship to realistically capture these scenes. His approach grew less popular as realism began to be challenged by the onset of Impressionist painting in France. For the remainder of the 1890s, Bricher exhibited works at the National Academy of Design and the American Water Color Society, illustrated for The Quarterly Illustrator, and traveled on sketching trips to White Rocks and Monhegan Island, Maine. In 1898, his work was carried by the Fifth Avenue Art Galleries.
In the twentieth century, Bricher continued to travel, paint, and show his work extensively. In 1905, he exhibited with the American Water Color Society at the Cincinnati Museum and sketched near Casco Bay, Maine. In 1908, the revered seascape painter passed away at his home in New Dorp, Staten Island on September 30.
The elegant marine seascapes of Alfred Thompson Bricher have been praised for both their attention to detail and commitment to portraying the serenity of nature. While his waves, cliffs, and sandy beaches are near-scientific renditions of nature, the culmination of these elements along with Bricher’s sunsets and luminous highlights result in an overall effect of great sublimity. The impressive list of exhibitions in which Bricher participated during his lifetime has been supplemented posthumously by the national museums that continue to collect his works, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Smithsonian Institutions. While impressively prolific, Bricher’s paintings remain highly coveted among private collectors throughout America.