Breaking Surf by Alfred Thompson Bricher, NA (1837-1908), oil on canvas 15″ x 33″, signed lower left.
Dating from his most mature period, Breaking Surf shows Alfred Thompson Bricher at his very best. The piece is defined by its clarity, with the light lending a contemplative stillness that distinguishes his style from the more dramatic strains of nineteenth-century landscape painting. The rocky shoreline, low horizon, and rolling surf suggest a setting along the Maine coast or the Bay of Fundy, areas Bricher returned to repeatedly over the decades. With waves breaking against the low rocks in the foreground, there is light just behind the clouds and calm in Bricher’s composition.
Medium: Oil on canvas
As a painter, Alfred Thompson Bricher embodies all the turn-of-century tropes that make American artists from the late 1800s spectacular. Both industrious and adventurous, the young Bricher ran away from his hometown of Newbury, Massachusetts at just 14 years old. Hoping to find his fortune in Boston, he found himself instead working at a dry-goods store. Within a few short years, however, Bricher rose from clerk to business owner, all while taking art classes at the recently inaugurated Lowell Institute.
Despite this brief formal education, Bricher was largely self-taught, often studying natural landscapes on hikes through the New England wilderness with his similarly sovereign peers. In 1858, after meeting fellow artists Charles Temple Dix and William Stanley Haseltine on one such trip to Mount Desert, Maine, Bricher returned to Boston determined to find financial success as an artist. Within a year, he opened his own studio.
Throughout the 1860s, Bricher produced images for L. Prang and Company’s print catalogue, an endeavor that allowed him to leverage his increased audience and income toward a move to New York City in 1868. At a National Academy of Design exhibition, Millstream at Newbury Port received substantial attention from critics and appreciators alike, Bricher himself was lauded for a style that echoed the acclaimed naturalists of the Hudson River School up-state. Even with his prolific output, Bricher’s art was slowly eclipsed by the rising popularity of modernism and his work faded into obscurity.
In the 1980s, nearly a century after his New York debut, Bricher’s paintings would be rediscovered and the artist would earn recognition as one of the last great Luminist painters of the 19th century.
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