Quietly poetic views of the New England coast typify the work of Alfred Thompson Bricher. Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the artist spent much of his childhood in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Although the details of his formal training are obscure, Bricher during the 1850s seems to have undertaken art study while working as a clerk in Boston. He opened his first studio in Newburyport in 1858, and by 1861 he was listed in the Boston city directory as "artist." Specializing in landscape painting, he quickly followed established painters to New Hampshire's White Mountains and other well-known scenic locales.

Bricher moved to New York in 1868. His paintings were well received at exhibitions of the National Academy of Design, and before long he became a regular participant in the city's art community. He was a lifelong member of the American Society of Painters in Water Color, and in 1879 he was elected an associate of the National Academy. Bricher continued to travel to New England in search of subjects, and at one point he may have traveled to Britain as well. Like other painters whose careers began during the heyday of the Hudson River School, Bricher fell out of favor during the latter decades of the nineteenth century. The artist remained active, however, and was able to support himself and his family in relative comfort until his death in 1908.

Gerrish Island, Kittery Point, Maine is typical of Bricher's coastal views. Balanced by an expansive sky above, a placid sea stretches across an emphatically horizontal canvas. To the left, a rocky outcropping snakes its way into the water, terminating near the centerpoint of the composition. A narrow strip of sand in the foreground is devoid of activity, but in the distance, a few sailing vessels signal a remote, yet reassuring, human presence. The stillness of the scene is broken only by tiny wavelets and what one imagines is a gentle breeze, impelling the boats across the horizon.

The sense of space and calm that pervades Bricher's canvas links it to the artistic phenomenon known as "Luminism." Luminism was not a coherent movement or academic approach but is rather a set of visual traits that effectively unites a broad body of work produced in America and northern Europe during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Luminist paintings often exhibit reductive compositions featuring large expanses of sky and water. Such compositions allow for a full range of atmospheric light effects, which in turn express the poetic mood of the work. Further enhancing the role of light, a sense of airless calm prevails in much Luminist work. Although modern scholars have seen in American Luminism a reflection of the transcendentalist ideas expounded by Ralph Waldo Emerson, artists of the time were seldom so analytical in their own understanding of the phenomenon. On the other hand, they readily divined its poetic possibilities, and many, including Bricher, employed a Luminist approach simply as a means of infusing their canvases with subjective sentiment.

Gerrish Island, Kittery Point, Maine reflects Bricher's particular fondness for the Maine coast. While the artist had painted marine views throughout New England and as far south as the Jersey shore, the beaches of Maine had ranked among his favorite subjects since his first trip to Mount Desert Island in 1858. Ranging from Kittery in the south to Eastport in the north, Bricher spent nearly half a century roaming the rocky shores of the Pine Tree State. Near the end of his life, he spent considerable time in the Casco Bay area, not far from the Prout's Neck studio of Winslow Homer (q.v.). Although both artists were dedicated to painting the sea, there is no record of any meeting between the two.

It is difficult to determine precisely when Bricher completed Gerrish Island, Kittery Point, Maine. The artist's style changed little over the course of his career, and after the early 1880s he seldom dated his works. Close compositional similarities between Gerrish Island and an important late work, Low Tide, Maine (1898, private collection in 1973), suggest that a date in the 1890s is not unreasonable, yet Bricher's tendency toward repeating older compositional devices calls for caution on the part of the researcher.(1)

Gerrish Island, Kittery Point, Maine was bequeathed by Henry Melville Fuller to the Currier Museum of Art in 2002.

VSD

NOTE

1. Low Tide, Maine was exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1898 as Low Tide, Hetherington's Cove, Grand Manan. For a reproduction of the work, see Jeffrey R. Brown, Alfred Thompson Bricher,1837-1908 (ex. cat. Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1973), p. 83.

REFERENCES

Jeffrey R. Brown. Alfred Thompson Bricher, 1837-1908. Ex. cat. Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1973.

John Duncan Preston, "Alfred Thompson Bricher, 1837-1908." The Art Quarterly XXV, no. 2 (Summer 1962): 149-156.