William Bradford Paintings

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Biography of William Bradford

A painter of marine and Arctic scenes, the painter 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 his 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 his victory, for on August 8, 1870, William Bradford artist 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 his rooms in the Tenth Street Studio Building, where he ordered the William Bradford paintings and encouraged him to bring them to London when completed.

Although Ashbury's commission provided an immediate incentive for going to England, William Bradford needed no reminder of the success achieved by his fellow artist-explorers, Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) and Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), who customarily sent their major William Bradford paintings to London for exhibition and potential sale. William Bradford painter 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 painter 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 his own in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the prosperous center of American whaling. Despite the wealth of the city his business faltered, then failed in 1852 because, as William Bradford put it, "I spent too much time painting to succeed."

Now insolvent and free to paint, he 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 painter soon left for study in Germany, he 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 art. Bierstadt headed for the West in 1859, and two years later William Bradford sailed north on the first of his six voyages to the coast of Labrador.

Two members of his 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 William Bradford paintings in disclosing the nature of the polar world.

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 art, 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).

Several days later, Queen Victoria viewed the William Bradford paintings left for her inspection and ordered a painting, perhaps indicating a preference based on one or another of the cabinet paintings. The William Bradford artwork that resulted, The Panther in Melville Bay (Pl. VII) was the first royal commission awarded to an American artist since the time of George III (r. 1760-1820) and Benjamin West (1738-1820). (10) The queen also subscribed for the photographs, which had the effect of transforming the proposed "album" into what became an elaborate oversized volume bound in tooled morocco with gilt designs (Pl. X), enclosing 141 tipped-in albumen photographs and a narrative text by William Bradford painter. Whether at Osborne House or later that season, Princess Louise also commissioned a painting, her choice being a View of the Sermitsialik Glacier (Pl. XII), based on a photograph (Pl. VIII) taken during the voyage of the Panther.