Object Details
Object Essay
The composition of On the Shore, Newport, Rhode Island is often found in Bricher’s coastal scenes of the 1870s and 1880s. He probably derived it from the paintings of John F. Kensett, but whereas the latter usually confined his landmass to a relatively small area of the canvas, Bricher extends his to the middle of the painting where large yachts securely anchor the composition. The female figures help to place this undated picture more precisely, for Bricher began to include such figures around 1877. In a letter of December 18, 1879 to H. R. Latimer of the Brooklyn Art Academy (where Bricher regularly exhibited his work) he reported, “My works are in much demand now since I have been varying them with human figures.”1John Duncan Preston, “Alfred Thompson Bricher, 1837–1908,” The Art Quarterly 25 no. 2 (Summer 1962), 155. For a comprehensive exhibition catalogue on Bricher, see Brown 1973. The artist had been sketching in Newport in the summer of 1878. Although he often worked these sketches into finished oils during the following winters, he was just as likely to return to them several years later. Indeed, in 1880 he exhibited Spring at Newport in Brooklyn, Chicago, and Springfield, almost surely a product of the 1878 sketches.2Ibid., appendix 3, 95. The painting was priced at $500, indicating that it was approximately the same size as On the Shore, Newport. Since the latter has no early provenance, one may wonder if they are the same painting.
Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Bricher studied at the Lowell Institute in Boston in 1851, but was largely self-taught. In 1858, he established a studio in Newburyport, a town where Martin Heade worked in the early 1860s: some of Bricher’s paintings of the early 1870s show Heade’s influence in the choice of broad coastal subjects. Bricher moved his studio to New York City in 1868. In 1876, he seems to have visited England; Constable’s influence may be seen in the cloud masses of On the Shore. Britcher maintained a studio at least until 1890, when he moved to New Dorp, Staten Island.3Brown 1973; Spassky, 517–18; Janson and Fraser, 213; Wilmerding et al. 1981, 115–16. These sources are not always in agreement.
The modishly dressed figures in so many of Bricher’s mature works distinguish them from the compositions of many of his colleagues. While Kensett, Heade, and Frederic E. Church, among others, focused on what they considered the natural essence of landscape, Bricher was often interested in the urbane side of his chosen scene. More than geographical location, his Newport is the locus of yacht races and summer society. This site has been tentatively identified as “the eastern side of Cliff Walk in the area around Ochre Point, looking east,” but the great summer cottage on the hill was probably “borrowed” from one on Ledge Road some distance away.4Workman, cat. no. 32. Bricher has recombined the elements to better suggest the beauty and luxury of Newport. This is a landscape painting with genre overtones, a tribute to the untroubled ease of a new American upper class to which the artist owed much of his patronage.
William Kloss
Excerpted from Clement E. Conger, et al. Treasures of State: Fine and Decorative Arts in the Diplomatic Reception Rooms of the U.S. Department of State. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1991.