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William Bradford
(Apr.30,1823 Mass.- Apr.25,1892 New York) American Oil Painting Artist Biography.
William Bradford was raised a Quaker in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, across the harbor from the busy whaling port of New Bedford. Bradford began to paint in New Bedford in 1852, having failed as the proprietor of clothing store, because, as he said, "I spent too much time painting to succeed." Setting up a art studio overlooking the harbor, he found his first subjects, the whale ships in port. Painting oil portraits and their ships for owners and captains, Bradford drew on his knowledge of hull form and rigging derived from his family's involvement as merchants and shipbuilders in the whaling trade. Before long, he traveled to Boston to paint more lucrative oil paintings of the larger clipper ships of that port in the same precise and accurate style.
Entirely self taught, in 1854 he acquired as a teacher and sometimes collaborator a recent immigrant trained in the Dutch school of marine seascape oil painting, Albert Van Beest. Under his influence, Bradford began to paint more ambitious scenes of maritime activity in the harbors of New Bedford and Boston, as well as of ships in distress, yachting regattas and coastal views in Maine and the Bay of Fundy.
By 1861 Bradford had moved to the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York City. There he met Frederic Edwin Church, whose adventurous travels to the Andes and those of fellow New Bedford artist, Albert Bierstadt, to the American West, must have encouraged Bradford to continue an interest he already had in the Arctic. With a mature style of his own, Bradford began a series of northern voyages that would bring him fame as the oil painter of the polar regions. Six cruises in chartered schooners brought him to the coast of Labrador, where ice-clogged harbors, crude summer settlements of Newfoundland fishermen and the distinctive light of a cold climate gave him subjects that advanced his reputation. Among them, the six-by-ten foot Sealers Crushed by Icebergs (1866) attracted large audiences during its multi-city tour as a single oil painting exhibition and it sold for a record setting price.
In early July, 1869, he chartered the small whaling steamer, Panther, and set out from St. Johns, Newfoundland, for Greenland. Among the passengers were two photographers, who made collodion plates of icebergs, coastal promontories and Eskimo villages while Bradford sketched from shipboard and on shore. From this material, he would work up in studios in New York, London and San Francisco, the oil paintings for which he became world famous.
In England for a portion of each year between 1871 and 1874, he enjoyed the most rewarding period of his career, due in part to the commission of a painting by Queen Victoria. The Monarch also headed the subscription list for his costly, oversized book, The Arctic Regions (1873), which contained his narrative of the Panther voyage, illustrated with 141 photographs, themselves among the earliest taken of this frozen world.
By the mid 1870s, William Bradford was wintering in New York, summering in New Bedford, painting oil paintings of the Arctic and giving lectures on the frozen north. These he illustrated with his photographs of the frigid wilderness, whose untouched beauty, overwhelming scale and crystal clear atmosphere continued to provide inspiration for his oil paintings throughout his career. After London, Bradford established a seasonal studio in San Francisco, where he painted from 1875 to 1881 both Arctic views and those of Yosemite Valley, the Sierra Nevada and other western mountain sites. In the 1880s, he and other artists of his generation suffered from a shift in taste, away from realistic depiction of the natural wonders found on the nation's frontiers to more recent innovations in technique and subject matter by painters who studied or observed the art scene in Europe.
By the time of his death in 1892, Bradford's reputation, along with those of his fellow artist-explorers, was declining. More than half a century would pass before a revival of interest in their paintings began to take place, expressed in exhibitions, publications and very high prices realized for his works, ensuring his position as one of the worlds artist.
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Ships and Iceberg
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Ice Floes under the Midnight Sun
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Sunset Calm in the Bay of Fundy
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Ice Dwellers Watching the Invaders
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