ALFRED THOMPSON BRICHER
1837-1908

The rugged cliffs of Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick, with the dramatic tides of the Bay of Fundy and the quiet coastal inlets at low tide were favorite subjects of A.T. Bricher. His works appeared in the major exhibitions of the late nineteenth century and were known through illustrations for Harper's New Monthly Magazine and the popular chromolithographs of Louis Prang.

Throughout his career, Bricher remained a conservative painter. He was particularly influenced by such artists as  John F. Kensett, a Hudson River school painter who inspired his interest in capturing effects of light and atmoshere.  The looser handling of paint in his later works shows the influence of the Barbizon painters.

Bricher was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1837 and spent his childhood in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where he attended school. Later, he worked as a clerk in a Boston drygoods store and painted in his spare time. He may have studied art at Lowell Institute in Boston during the mid-fifties; although an 1875 article in the Art Journal states that during his early years in Boston, Bricher had little contact with other artists and was “entirely self-taught” (p. 340).  The same article says that William Stanley Haseltine and Charles temple Dix (1840-1873), whom Bricher met in 1858 while sketching on Mount Desert Island, Maine had a decisive influence on his style.  Haseltine's paintings of sunstruck, fissured rocks on the New England coast may have prompted Bricher to turn from landscapes to marine paintings in which large rocks dominate the foreground.  He probably also knew the marine and still-life painter Martin Johnson Heade, who worked in Newburyport during the early 1860's. In addition to painting on the New England coast, Bricher went on sketching trips to the White Mountains and the Catskills and in 1866 to the upper Mississippi River and Minnesota.

Bricher moved to New York in 1868. During the 1870's, he occupied a studio in the YMCA Building. He was a member of the American Society of Painters in Water Colors and an associate of the National Academy of Design. In 1882, while maintaining a studio in New York, he built a summer home in Southampton, Long Island, to be closer to the sea. From 1890 until his death in 1908, he lived in New Dorp, Staten Island.

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS:
Indianapolis Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City