Considered one of the best maritime painters of the late nineteenth century, Alfred Thompson Bricher was a member of the last generation of artists known as the Hudson River School. He was working at the same time as Frederic Edwin Church, Sanford Gifford and John Kensett, who were also considered masters of the idiom. His career spanned more than fifty years during which he attained recognition by the public and the art world alike.

Born in 1837 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Bricher concentrated on images of the sea. He worked all along the coasts of Maine and Massachusetts. As a luminist painter, he was predominately interested in the pictorial effects of light and translucency. It is always possible to ascertain such specifics as the time of day, weather conditions, and geography in his work, yet his paintings manifest a spiritual quality that was an important component of Hudson River School painting.

In his work, there is often no sign of man - just Nature. Oddly, Bricher continued painting peaceful scenes of nature even at the height of the horrors of the Civil War, a war in which his younger brother was killed. His perseverence in this style underscores his belief that Nature is the more powerful force.

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Albert Thompson Bricher was one of the most important marine painters of 19th-centuryAmerica. Often compared to William Trost Richards, he was a painter associated with the later generation of the Hudson River School and with the phenomenon of Luminism. (1) As one contemporary critic noted, Bricher "has made a specialty of subjects in which wide stretches of the ocean are illuminated by shimmering light which sifts through the clouds and makes the water sparkle like diamonds in a silver setting. Salient features of the foregrounds are the masses of rocks covered with seaweed, their brown and purple surfaces forming effective contrasts with the lighter tints of the sea and sky." (2)

Bricher was born on April 10, 1837 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. His early training was at The Lowell Institute in Boston. His earliest work dates from 1856, and in 1858, he opened a studio in Newburyport. In the late 1850's he met artists Charles Temple Dix and William S. Haseltine sketching at Mount Desert, Maine. In 1868, he married and moved to New York City, the year of his first exhibition at The American Watercolor Society, to which he was elected member in 1873. In 1875, he made his first trip to Grand Manan Island, Canada and in 1876, he exhibited at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. In 1879, Bricher was elected an Associate, The National Academy of Design. In 1881, he married Alice L. Robinson. Around 1882, he built a studio at Southampton, Long Island, New York. In 1890, he built a home at New Dorp, Staten Island, New York, where he lived until his death on September 30, 1908.
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(1) Diana Strazdes, American Paintings and Sculpture to 1945 in the Carnegie Museum of Art, © 1992 by the Carnegie Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, published by Hudson Hills Press, New York, NY, pp. 106-7.

(2) Quoted by Barbara Novak, Nineteenth-Century America Painting, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, ©1986, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, pp. 152-7.

(3) Biographical notes from Jeffrey R. Brown, Albert Thompson Bricher, 1837-1908, an Exhibition Catalogue, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, 1973.