Essay
Literature
Elizabeth Wilson, review of “The Nature of a Nation: Paintings of the Hudson River School” (Questroyal Fine Art, LLC), ARTnews, May 2008, 149.
Related Work
Alfred Thompson Bricher, A Lift in the Fog, Grand Manan, 1876, oil on canvas, 26 x 50 inches, signed and dated 1876 lower left
Alfred Thompson Bricher was one of the nineteenth century’s greatest marine painters, able to capture the poetry of the sea on canvas. He traveled throughout New England and Canada in search of his subject, returning to study the same watery expanses under different lights and atmospheres. Grand Manan Island, located in New Brunswick, Canada, was one of his favorite sites, and he devoted numerous paintings to the rugged locale. Bricher made his first expedition in 1876, exhibiting a large work, A Lift in the Fog, Grand Manan, at the National Academy of Design that same year.[ii] Lifting Fog, Grand Manan is a variation on A Lift in the Fog, showing the mist beginning to clear.
In Lifting Fog, a beam of sunlight breaks through the clouds and announces the first rustlings of day—birds flying above the lake and a couple setting off from shore. These signs of life are in direct contrast to the barren landscape of A Lift in the Fog, which features an overturned rowboat tethered to the shore.[iii] Such variations were an essential part of Bricher’s studio method, in which he transformed the sketches from his travels into larger paintings. By cataloguing the moments when fog descends or recedes, Lifting Fog and A Lift in the Fog provide variations on the landscape’s past, present, and future, locating the life of the island in time.
The movement of the people, birds, and piercing light in Lifting Fog captures a more animated moment in time. The figures take the piece outside the realm of the studio, activating the landscape with their presence. A third figure stands farther back on the shore, cloaked in the shadow of the colossal cliffs. His tiny form conveys the astounding grandeur of the island, which boasted four-hundred-foot cliffs and mammoth tides. Using human figures to provide scale was a common method among Hudson River School artists, but Bricher makes the device his own by turning the figure into a shadowy observer. As the specter gazes into the depths of the sea—where mist consumes the bodies of sailboats hovering over the horizon line—he literally figures its awe-inspiring power.
It was this power that compelled countless artists to visit Grand Manan, including William Bradford, Frederic Church, and Sanford Robinson Gifford.[iv] An 1878 article written by Edward Abbott and illustrated by Bricher describes the island’s romantic appeal:
[The tides of Grand Manan] sweep with unexampled volume and swiftness in from the Atlantic… rising to an audacious height, and when retiring [uncover] an impressively wide expanse of rock-bound and weed-matted shore…as if the sea had receded never to return.[v]
The palpably dense haze of Lifting Fog conveys the island’s mysterious power in pictorial terms.
Bricher’s ability to articulate atmospheric weight allowed him to use light and air to express profound, timeless ideologies, making him one of the most skillful painters of American Luminism. In his survey of the Luminist movement, John Wilmerding contends that Grand Manan inspired Bricher to create some of his most “eloquent Luminist oils.”[vi] Indeed, its sublime nature provided a transcendent subject for Bricher, inciting him to capture its impenetrable atmosphere on canvas.
AJC
Bricher’s work reached a wide circulation in chromolithographs published by Louis Prang & Company. He exhibited annually at the National Academy of Design and the American Society of Painters in Water Colors in the thirty years before his death. His paintings are now in the White House, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection in Madrid.
[i] Exhibited at the National Academy of Design 1876 Annual, no. 390, and featured in Jeffrey R. Brown, Alfred Thompson Bricher, 1837–1905 (Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1973), 59, no. 35, illustrated.
[ii] Brown, 20–21.
[iii] Brown points out that the boat was directly transplanted from a sketch that Bricher made in Rhode Island five years earlier, “down to the crumpled canvas on the ground.” Brown, 59. See Narragansett Pier, 28 June 1871, pencil on paper, 4 3/4 x 10 3/8 inches, in Sketchbook L, in Brown, 19, no. 4.
[iv] Brown, 63.
[v] Edward Abbott cited in Brown, 21.
[vi] John Wilmerding, American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850–1875 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press and the National Gallery of Art, 1989), 131.