Lifting Fog, Grand Manan

Provenance

Thomas Colville Fine Art, LLC, New Haven, Connecticut

Questroyal Fine Art, LLC, New York, New York, acquired from above, 2005

Private collection, Millerton, New York, acquired from above

Literature

Elizabeth Wilson, “Reviews: The Nature of a Nation: Paintings of the Hudson River School at Questroyal Fine Art, LLC,” ARTnews (May 2008): 149.

Related Work

A Lift in the Fog, Grand Manan, 1876, oil on canvas, 26 x 50 inches, signed and dated lower left; private collection, as reproduced in Jeffrey R. Brown, Alfred Thompson Bricher, 1837–1905 (Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1973), 59, no. 35.

Note

Bricher first visited Grand Manan Island, located in New Brunswick, Canada in 1876, and it soon became one of his favorite locales to paint. He exhibited a large work, A Lift in the Fog, Grand Manan, at the National Academy of Design that same year,_[1] a more barren depiction of the setting compared to the breaking sunlight, birds, and figures in the present work._[2] In his survey of the luminist movement, John Wilmerding contends that Grand Manan inspired Bricher to create some of his most “eloquent Luminist oils.”_[3]

_[1] Jeffrey R. Brown, Alfred Thompson Bricher, 1837–1905 (Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1973), 20–21.
_[2] 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.
_[3] John Wilmerding, American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850–1875 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press and the National Gallery of Art, 1989), 131.