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A Harbor on the Coast of Labrador

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A Harbor on the Coast of Labrador

circa 1875
oil on canvas
18 1/8 in. x 30 3/8 in. (46.04 cm x 77.15 cm)
Bequest of George A. Leighton, PC L 5 (00)

William Bradford
American
1823–1892

William Bradford is best known for his arctic marines. Born in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, Bradford was an avid amateur draftsman. When a business venture terminated in bankruptcy in 1852, he established a studio and began to paint ship portraits. Two years later, Bradford met the Dutch artist Albert van Beest (1820-1860), regarded by nineteenth-century historian Henry T. Tuckerman as "the best foreign marine painter in the country."(1) For some time afterward, van Beest shared Bradford's studio, providing the younger artist with instruction and collaborating with him on a number of canvases.

Following van Beest's death in 1860, Bradford undertook a series of annual summer trips to Nova Scotia, Labrador, and farther north. The most memorable of these trips took place in 1869, when the artist, backed by a wealthy patron, outfitted a voyage to Greenland aboard the steamship Panther. Not long before, Bradford, who had begun exhibiting at the National Academy of Design in 1860, had taken a studio in New York City. During the early 1870s Bradford lived for periods of time in London, where he received a commission for an arctic scene from Queen Victoria. The artist afterward traveled to the West, establishing himself in San Francisco in 1875. Back in New York by 1881, Bradford spent much of his later life painting arctic scenes from photographs and giving lectures accompanied by lantern slides. The artist died in New York in 1892.

The Currier's A Harbor on the Coast of Labrador is a familiar Bradford image depicting fishing craft in the cold waters off Labrador. Positioned between a gravelly beach in the foreground and a rocky island in the distance, three schooners ride a calm, if ice-strewn, sea. Near the middle of the canvas, a dory oared by several fishermen passes from right to left. Above the men rises an iceberg, its pointed peaks echoing the triangular sails of the nearby ships. Emphasizing the vastness of the scene, large cloud masses contrast with the tiny shapes of icebergs on the horizon to the right.

The ships depicted in A Harbor on the Coast of Labrador most likely belong to what was known as a "floater" crew. In contrast to the "stationer" fishing crews that were based at small mercantile outposts along the coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador, floater crews were wide-ranging, and often pushed much farther north than their stationer counterparts. Deploying during the summer months, the floaters loaded their holds with heavily salted codfish, which would be taken back to their home ports for drying in the fall. Bradford's image captures the salient details of the floater fishery, its small schooners and dories, and juxtaposes them against a grand backdrop that simultaneously asserts the cosmic insignificance and the heroic tenacity of the fishermen who worked the far northern reaches.

A Harbor on the Coast of Labrador has been dated on stylistic grounds to the mid-1870s. As an old label on the reverse indicates, Bradford at one point sent the painting to an art exhibition at the Minneapolis Industrial Exposition. While there were a number of annual industrial expositions held in Minneapolis beginning in the 1880s, it is likely that A Harbor on the Coast of Labrador was shown at the exposition of 1886, to which Bradford, who had been accorded the honor of his own gallery, contributed some twenty-seven paintings. By 1913 the painting had passed into the possession of collector George A. Leighton, who gave it to the Currier Museum of Art in 1918.

VSD

NOTE

1. Henry T. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists (reprint; New York: James F. Carr, 1967), p. 554.

REFERENCES

Richard C. Kugler with contributions by Erik A. R. Ronnenberg Jr.; Adam Greenhalgh, and R. M. Riefstahl. William Bradford: Sailing Ships and Arctic Seas. Ex. cat. New Bedford Whaling Museum, New Bedford, MA, 2003.

Sandra S. Phillips. "The Arctic Voyage of William Bradford." Aperture 90 (1983): 16-27.

Henry T. Tuckerman. Book of the Artists. Reprint. New York: James F. Carr, 1967.

http://collections.ic.gc.ca/fisheries . Accessed February 16, 2005.


Exhibition
1969 De Cordova Museum, Lincoln, MA, "William Bradford." Nov. 2 - Dec. 28.

1977 Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, NH, "Out for an Airing." June 18 - Sept. 11.


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