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16

Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection ALFRED THOMPSON BRICHER (1837-1908) Hunter i...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:125,000.00 - 175,000.00 USD
Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection ALFRED THOMPSON BRICHER (1837-1908) Hunter i...
Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
ALFRED THOMPSON BRICHER
(1837-1908)
Hunter in the Meadows of Old Newburyport, Massachusetts
signed with monogrammed initials "A T Bricher" (lower left)
oil on canvas
22 x 44 1/8 in. (56 x 111.8 cm)
painted circa 1873 <p> Estimate: $125,000-175,000 <p> Provenance
New York art market Ira Spanierman, Inc., New York Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Lugano, Switzerland, 1980 <p> Exhibited
Houston, The Museum of Fine Arts; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Art Center; Omaha, Joslyn Museum of Art, Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Painting: Selections from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, October 29, 1982-June 19, 1983, no. 4 (illustrated) <p> Literature
"American Landscape Painting," The Magazine Antiques, CXXII, 1982, 912 (illustrated) Barbara Novak, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection: Nineteenth-Century American Painting, London, 1986, pp. 152-155, no. 41 (illustrated, p. 153) <p> Painted in the same year as his magnum opus, Time and Tide (Dallas Museum of Art), Bricher's Hunter in the Meadows of Old Newburyport, Massachusetts, constitutes a rare departure from the crystalline shoreline views. The present work offers a tantalizing glimpse of the artist's true range. Bricher was enormously successful in New York after his move there in 1869, thanks in large part to his lucrative business relationship with Louis Prang, who popularized Bricher's work through chromolithographic reproduction. His paintings of the 1870s embody a youthful sense of freshness and experimentation as the artist honed his artistic vision. <p> A watercolor of a similar subject as the present work, On the Meadows of Old Newburyport, 1873 (Collection of Jo Ann and Julian Ganz, Jr.), offers an insightful comparison with Hunter in the Meadows. In the watercolor version, the visual field is dramatically expanded to include a domestic scene of a mother and children in the near foreground, as well as a distant hill at the far right of the composition. These elements establish a degree of closure at the right edge of the composition, keeping the viewer's attention more strictly within the frame than is the case in Hunter in the Meadows. Ironically, by narrowing his focus in the present work, Bricher has opened up his composition to more profound contemplation and a sense of the infinite. With fewer visual incidents to distract the viewer from the qualities of light and atmosphere that so distinguish his works, Hunter in the Meadows appears to extend along the horizon, far beyond the scope of the composition and is equally unlimited in the vertical axis thanks to the wide expanse of sky and the shaft of light that penetrates the trees and water below. In the essentialized, greatly narrowed purview of the present work, we find an articulate visual equivalent for what scholars John Wilmerding and Barbara Novak have called the "physiology" of luminism: "Like the physiology of the body, luminism has two sides: one bright, still, and intimate; the other dark, dramatic, and expansive."1 <p> We are grateful to Mark Mitchell for cataloguing this lot. <p> Notes 1 John Wilmerding, American Art, New York, 1976, p. 94.
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