(1837–1908)
Alfred Thompson Bricher was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and grew up in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Having apparently taught himself how to paint, he opened a studio in Boston in 1859. During the 1860s, he focused on landscape painting, traveling to the Catskill and White Mountains as well as along the New England coast. He began exhibiting his work in the mid-1860s, and gained widespread recognition through chromolithographs produced by L. Prang & Co. He married in 1868 and moved to New York, where he had a studio in the Y. M. C. A. Building. Bricher began to focus almost exclusively on the New England coast during the 1870s, and he would continue to paint coastal views until the end of his life. He spent much time on the Maine coast and Grand Manan Island in New Brunswick, as well as on Long Island and Staten Island, where he settled in 1894.
Perhaps in order to compensate for his lack of formal instruction, Bricher rapidly assimilated the styles of major landscape painters such as Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, and Frederic Church during the early and mid-1860s. As his interests expanded to incorporate luminist principles, Bricher looked increasingly to John Frederick Kensett’s work for inspiration, although Bricher’s work was always more rooted in his direct experience of nature. Bricher hit his stride as a painter while working in this mode during the 1870s, and he developed a more distinctive style during the 1880s and 1890s, in which he used slanting sunlight and freer brushwork in order to capture atmospheric effects along the coast.
Bricher was an associate of the National Academy of Design and a member of the Artists’ Fund Society, American Watercolor Society, and the Brooklyn Art Association. His work can be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Brooklyn Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D. C.; the Art Institute of Chicago; and Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum of Art, Madrid.