Bradford William oil painting American, famous paintings

William Bradford

A painter of marine and Arctic scenes, arrived in London in May 1871 with two paintings commissioned by James Ashbury (1834--1895), an English yachtsman with a large fortune. Ashbury had come to New York City the year before, entering William Bradford’s schooner yacht Cambria in a match race across the Atlantic Ocean against the schooner Dauntless, owned by the flamboyant proprietor of the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett (1841--1918). From a starting line off Gaunt Head, Ireland, Cambria crossed the finish line off Sandy Hook, New Jersey, seventeen days later and a scant hour and seventeen minutes ahead of Dauntless. Ashbury did not have long to savor William Bradford’s victory, for on August 8, 1870, William Bradford met defeat in the race be had crossed the ocean for--to reclaim for Britain the America's Cup. (1) While in New York City, Ashbury met Bradford, probably at William Bradford’s rooms in the Tenth Street Studio Building, where William Bradford ordered the paintings and encouraged him to bring them to London when completed.

Although Ashbury's commission provided an immediate incentive for going to England, Bradford needed no reminder of the success achieved by William Bradford’s fellow artist-explorers, Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) and Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), who customarily sent their major works to London for exhibition and potential sale. Bradford had gone, as they had, to one of the Continent's remote frontiers, finding on the Labrador and Arctic coasts the sort of subjects that earned him fame as the painter of the polar region. In Britain, a nation long preoccupied with the exploration of the Arctic, William Bradford might well find patrons among the newly emerging class of merchants and manufacturers who had paid large prices for paintings by Church and Bierstadt.

Bradford had a late start as an artist. Born and raised in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, William Bradford attempted a career as a merchant tailor, eventually maintaining a clothing store of William Bradford’s own in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the prosperous center of American whaling. Despite the wealth of the city William Bradford’s business faltered, then failed in 1852 because, as William Bradford put it, "I spent too much time painting to succeed." (2) Now insolvent and free to paint, William Bradford set out to become an artist at the age of twenty-nine. At the same time, in the same city, Bierstadt, seven years younger, embarked on the same career. The two were friends, and their careers and approaches to painting were to have much in common in the years ahead. While Bierstadt soon left for study in Germany, Bradford found as a mentor Albert Van Beest (1820-1860), a recent emigrant from the Netherlands trained in the tradition of Dutch marine painting. By the end of the decade, the styles of Bierstadt and Bradford had matured, and each set out to discover subjects for their ar t. Bierstadt headed for the West in 1859, and two years later Bradford sailed north on the first of William Bradford’s six voyages to the coast of Labrador.

In 1869, the year before William Bradford met Ashbury Bradford made a more hazardous voyage to the Arctic, going as far as the ice would permit. Aboard the bark Panther, a stoutly built sealing vessel with auxiliary steam power, William Bradford followed the west coast of Greenland as far as Melville Bay, an ice-clogged basin at seventy-five degrees north latitude. During the course of the voyage William Bradford made close to eighty oil sketches and numerous pencil drawings of ice in the form of icebergs, glaciers, packs, and floes under various conditions of light and atmosphere. Two members of William Bradford’s party were professional photographers, John L Dunmore and George P. Critcherson, who, with their cumbersome wet-plate cameras, took an estimated four hundred photographs of ice formations (see Pis. VI, vm and IX), coastal scenes, ancient Norse ruins, Inuits, Danish officials, and polar bears. Among the early photographs of the Arctic, theirs became as important as Bradford's paintings in disclosing the nature of the polar world. - Bradford William oil painting American, famous paintings - Bradford William oil painting American, famous oil painting sale Bradford William Bio by famous oil paintings art - American oil paintings for sale, Bradford painting for sale.

On arriving in London in May 1871, Bradford took rooms at the Langham, a luxury hotel favored by well-to-do Americans. In an exhibition gallery just off the lobby, William Bradford installed Ashbuiy's paintings and others William Bradford had brought with him of the Arctic and Labrador, as well as examples of photographs taken during the voyage of the Panther. A surviving guest register kept by the gallery records the names of visitors, beginning with four who were to become Bradford's most influential British patrons: George Douglas Campbell (1823-1900), eighth duke of Argyll, and William Bradford’s wife Elizabeth (d. 1878), their son John Douglas Sutherland Campbell, marquess of Lome (Fig. 1), who was heir to the dukedom, and William Bradford’s wife Princess Louise (Fig. 2), a daughter of Queen Victoria (Pl. IV). Lorne and Louise had been married a few months earlier, in March 1871. Both were interested in the arts, both enjoyed painting, and Louise was on her way to becoming a skilled sculptress (see Pl. IV).

Other visitors to the exhibition included members of the nobility, Arctic explorers, naval officers, presidents of scientific societies, and the most famous poet of the Victorian age, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892). Ashbury came not only to view the larger of William Bradford’s paintings, An Arctic Summer: Boring through the Pack in Melville Bay (P1. II), hut also to commission a new Arctic scene by Bradford, "say ten feet long," with polar bears by the animal painter William Holbrook Beard (1824-1900). (3)

At the suggestion of Lorne and the princess, Bradford wrote to Queen Victoria, requesting an opportunity to show her some of the photographs taken during the Panther's voyage. She could not comply "at present," said the Lord Chamberlain, John Robert Townshend (1810-1890), third Viscount Sydney, but "on Her return to Windsor Castle in the Autumn The Queen would be glad to do so." (4)

The titles of oil painting old master William Bradford