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Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection ALFRED THOMPSON BRICHER (1837-1908) Low Tide...

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) Low Tide...
Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
ALFRED THOMPSON BRICHER
(1837-1908)
Low Tide at Swallow Tail Cove
signed with monogrammed initials "AT Bricher" (lower right)
oil on canvas
25 x 52 1/4 in. (63.8 x 132.6 cm)
painted circa 1890-1900 <p> Estimate: $125,000-175,000 <p> Provenance
Private Collection, St. Louis 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. 5 (illustrated) Rome, Musei Vaticani; Lugano, Villa Malpensata, Maestri Americani della Collezione Thyssen-Bornemisza,1983-1984, no. 24 and 23 respectively (illustrated) Baltimore, The Baltimore Museum of Art; Detroit, The Detroit Institute of Arts; Denver, The Denver Art Museum; San Antonio, Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute; New York, IBM Gallery of Arts and Sciences; San Diego, San Diego Museum of Art; Palm Beach, The Society of the Four Arts, American Masters: The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, October 28, 1984-April 13, 1986, no. 25 (illustrated) Charlottenburg, Museen Preubischer Kulturbesitz, Nationalgalerie and Orangerie des Schlosses; Zürich, Kunsthaus, Bilder aus der Neuen Welt, Amerikanische Malerei des 18 und 19 Jahrhunderts, Meisterwerke aus der Sammlung Thyssen-Bornemisza und Museen der Vereingten Staaten, November 22, 1988-May 1989, no. 35 (as Low Tide at Yellow Gail Cove) <p> Literature
Barbara Novak, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection: Nineteenth-Century American Painting, London, 1986, p. 156, no. 42 (illustrated, p. 157) <p> In his catalogue on the works of Alfred Bricher, Jeffrey R. Brown succinctly characterized the artist's low tide scenes of the 1890s as "brandy from the wine of experience."1 Indeed, the present work exhibits the artist's tried and true compositional schema to remarkable effect. <p> By the 1890s, Bricher was one of the enduringly successful second generation of Hudson River School painters. His work had been a staple at the National Academy's annuals for two decades as well as in such international events as the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1878. The consistently high quality of Bricher's marines such as Low Tide at Swallow Tail Cove earned the artist a distinguished place in the canon of American art history. Crispness and brilliance are the defining virtues of Bricher's finest paintings, and the present work excels in both. On this placid sea, along the Maine coast that he painted so frequently, the artist has encapsulated a moment of peace and poetic harmony among the natural elements. The great strength of Low Tide in Swallow Tail Cove is that it combines that harmony with specificity of detail and spatial awareness. Awash in light, the scene has been carefully manipulated to regulate the passage of the viewer's eye through the composition. As one of the artist's earliest scholars wrote of Bricher in 1962, "His best marines are classic statements of peace."2 Nothing written of Bricher's work subsequently has better assessed the nature of paintings such as Low Tide in Swallow Tail Cove. <p> We are grateful to Mark Mitchell for cataloguing this lot. <p> NOTES 1 Jeffrey R. Brown, Alfred Thompson Bricher, 1938-1908, exh. cat., Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis,1973, p. 31. 2 John Duncan Preston, "Alfred Thompson Bricher, 1837-1908," Art Quarterly, 25.1, 1962, p. 156.
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