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Along with his contemporaries, Frederic E. Church and Albert Bierstadt, William Bradford was one of the most renowned artist-explorers of the nineteenth century. A specialist in marine subjects, Bradford's views of the Arctic, Greenland and Labrador brought him widespread critical acclaim both in the United States and abroad. Bradford also left an important pictorial record of the frozen north through the hundreds of photographs taken during his trips to the North Atlantic.
Born into a Quaker family in Fairhaven, Massachusetts in 1823, Bradford developed an interest in art during his boyhood. As a youth, he worked in his father's store in the whaling town of New Bedford, where he often painted the ships in the harbor during his spare time. Later, in 1852, Bradford was unsuccessful in his attempt to operate a wholesale clothing store, remarking that he had "spent too much time in painting to succeed." Between 1854 and 1857, Bradford made the first of several trips to Labrador. By 1855 he had established a studio in Fairhaven, earning a modest living as a ship portraitist. Inspired to some extent by the work of the Gloucester artist, Fitz Hugh Lane, the earliest exponent of American Luminism, Bradford worked in a style distinguished by careful draftsmanship, meticulous detail, a cool palette and a concern for the effects of light and atmosphere.
In the fall of 1855, Bradford came into contact with the Dutch marine painter, Albert Van Beest, who had just moved to Fairhaven. Over the next two years, Beest provided Bradford with his only formal art instruction and collaborated with him on several paintings. While retaining the crisp linearity of his early manner, Bradford acquired the Dutch penchant for low horizons and heavy, atmospheric skies.
In 1860 Bradford moved to New York City. One year later he acquired studio space in the famous Tenth Street Studio Building, where he met Albert Bierstadt, the Hudson River School painter (with New Bedford connections) critically acclaimed for his sublime, grandiose portrayals of the western frontier.
Bradford made his first voyage to the Arctic in 1861. With the exception of one year, he made annual visits thereafter until 1869. His final trip, which included a sojourn in Greenland, resulted in the publication of The Arctic Regions (1873) which contained 125 photographs. After settling in London in 1872, Bradford embarked on a highly successful career as a lecturer on the Arctic. He also continued to paint, producing The Panther off the Coast of Greenland under the Midnight Sun (Collection H.R.H. Queen Elizabeth II, London) for Queen Victoria in 1873.
Returning to the United States in 1874, Bradford was elected an Associate member of the National Academy of Design in New York. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, his style became more painterly with a dramatic use of color. During the last twenty years of his life, he derived many of his compositions from his own photographs and sketchbooks. Bradford also visited and painted in the American West, in the Yosemite and Mariposa Valleys and the Sierra Nevada region. He died in New York in 1892.
A major figure in the history of American marine painting, Bradford's art touches upon two vital mid-nineteenth century aesthetics: his concern for the depiction of light and atmosphere allies him with American Luminism, while his desire to pictorialize the exotic, unexplored frontier embraces concepts of nationalism and expansion associated with the Hudson River School. Examples of Bradford's work can be found in many of America's foremost public collections, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Chicago Art Institute, Illinois; and the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
CL
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