Alfred Thompson Bricher, (1837- 1908)

One of the last of the Luminist painters, Alfred Thompson Bricher was known principally for oil and watercolor paintings of the coast of New England. He brought to a close the cult of nature painting that was started by Thomas Cole and was carried on by such men as Martin Johnson Heade, Frederic Edwin Church and William Haseltine. Many of his sweeping panoramas of the coastline, although well done, suffered from a sameness of format in the opinion of some critics.
  
Bricher was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire in 1837. As a teenager he went to Boston to find a job in business and spent his spare time painting at the Lowell Institute. In 1858, he began painting full-time. For the next 10 years, he worked in Boston and Newburyport, north of Boston.
  
In 1871, he moved to New York and settled on Staten Island. Every summer, however, he went North to sketch and paint on Grand Manan Island and on the shores of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. His particular strength was his ability to capture the translucent appearance of the sea and the crispness of the horizon under a luminous sky.
  
While Bricher displayed a sure linear touch in his oil paintings, there was a greater freedom in his watercolors. His subject matter in the watercolor was more varied, too. Some of his female figures in the medium bear comparison to those that Winslow Homer was painting in the 1870s.

Bricher died in New Dorp on Staten Island in 1908. In the years that followed, his work was largely forgotten. The 1980s had rediscovered him, and now he is looked upon as one of the better marine painters of his time.

Public Collections
Indianapolis Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

E. Irving Couse (1866-1936)

Eanger Irving Couse was born in Saginaw, Michigan in 1866, and during his childhood he became familiar with the large Native American population, which continued to flourish in the Saginaw area into the 1870s. From an early age Couse had wanted to become an artist, and he regularly visited the local settlements of the Chippewa and Ogibwa tribes to sketch the tepees and make figure studies of the Indians. His formal artistic training began at the Art Institute of Chicago, and then continued at the National Academy of Design in New York. Finally, Couse spent four years studying under Adolphe Bouguereau at the Academie Julian in Paris, where he adopted the French Academic painting style, which would endure for the rest of his career.

While in Paris, Couse married a fellow student, Virginia Walker, whose family lived on a ranch in Washington, near the Oregon border. In 1891 the couple resumed to the Northwest and Couse gained access to the local Klikitat, Yakima and Umatilla tribes, and completed his first Indian paintings. Couse did not visit Taos until 1902, after he had met Joseph Henry Sharp, Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Phillips in Paris, and they had told him of the beauty of the New Mexico landscape and the Indian population who lived in the relatively undisturbed Pueblo culture there. Couse immediately took to Taos, and Patricia Janis Broder writes: “Taos was everything Couse had dreamed of. The Taos people and their routines of life at the Pueblo satisfied all of his artistic requirements and desires. He recognized that in the Pueblos of the Southwest he had found the ideal Indian subjects for his paintings” (Patricia Janis Broder, Taos: A Painter’s Dream, Boston, Massachusetts, 1980, p. 149).

Couse spent every summer in Taos from 1902 until 1927, when he became a permanent resident. He was a prominent figure in the town and was elected the first president of the Taos Society of Artists in 1915. He established many close friendships within the local Indian population who became willing models for him. Patricia Janis Broder writes: “He was not interested in depicting the daily or ceremonial life of the Taos Indians but preferred to paint his models in traditional studio poses” (Broder, p. 141). However, he did paint a series of Indian subjects as hunters, in which the Indian is depicted in a traditional role, proving his skill as a hunter and living off the meat from the animals and birds of the forest. Images such as this provided Couse with a subject that spans both the traditional concept of the Indian as a hunter warrior and the peaceful, sympathetic characters that inhabit Couse’s popular interior Indian subjects.

Publications:
E. Irving Couse: 1866-1936 by Nicholas Woloshuk (Santa Fe Village Art Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1976) page 90-color reproduction.
E. Irving Couse: Image Maker for America edited by Virginia Couse Leavitt & Ellen Landis (Albuquerque Museum of Art, 1991) page 221, color reproduction.
Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe Railway, 1928 Calendar, color reproduction.

Partial List of Public Collections:
Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ
Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, AZ
San Diego Museum, San Diego, CA
Colorado Springs Museum, Colorado Springs, CO.
Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
Metropolitan Museum, N.Y.
National Cowboy & Western Historical Museum, Okla. City, OK
C.M. Russell Museum, Great Falls, MT
Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK
El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, TX
Museum of the Southwest, Midland, TX
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX
Stark Museum, Orange, TX
The Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK
ETC.

Ernest Albert (1857-1946)

Ernest Albert was a distinguished theatrical and scenic designer who also became a landscape painter and muralist; Ernest Albert worked in New York, St. Louis, and Chicago.

He was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1857, and showing early talent, he received the Graham Art Medal at age 15, while he was studying at the Brooklyn Art Institute. Though Albert had some early success as a newspaper artist, his introduction to the theater world in 1877 began a career in stage design; he worked on productions starring most of the best-known performers of the day. During this time in 1879, he employed and befriended young Jules Guerin, who went on to become the Lincoln Memorial Muralist.

From New York City, Albert went to St. Louis in 1880 and five years later to Chicago. In 1892, he became involved with the World’s Colombian Exposition in Chicago. He was responsible for the color schemes and ornamental design of many of the interiors of buildings in that renowned and successful fair. While in Chicago, he helped found the American Society of Scenic Painters.

In 1894, Albert returned to New York City, where, from then on, his work in scenic design was centered. His Albert Studios did the sets for many successful productions. All along, he had painted whenever he could snatch the time. At the pinnacle of his career in 1905, he began to withdraw gradually from his theater work. His family was settled in the striking new house he had built in New Rochelle, New York; his financial independence was established; and from then on, he devoted most of his considerable talent and energy to his landscapes.

Albert’s landscapes, painted mostly in Old Lyme, Connecticut and later on Monhegan Island, Maine (as well as a few on the West Coast), are simple in composition but subtle in effect. His impressionistic rendering of color and light imbue his quiet country scenes with all the magic of the moment. The gentle strength of these pictures and of his still lifes ensured their popularity and earned him a place as one of America’s respected artists.

Albert was active in several organizations and was a founder and first president of the Allied Artists of America.

Museums:
Wadsworth Antheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT.
Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME
Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, CT.

HOVSEP PUSHMAN (1877-1966)

Hovsep Pushman was one of those rare artists whose work was appreciated by both critics and collectors, and who enjoyed recognition and good fortune. In a 1932 one-man show at New York’s Grand Central Art Galleries, the entire display of 16 Pushman paintings was sold before opening day’s end.

Pushman, later a naturalized American citizen, was born in Armenia in 1877. At age 11, he held a scholarship at the Constantinople Academy of Art. By 17, he had gone to the United States and started teaching art in Chicago.  Pushman received his formal education in Paris at the Beaux-Arts Academie under Lefebvre, Robert-Fleury and Dechenaud. He exhibited his work at the Salon des Artistes Francais in Paris, winning a bronze medal in 1914 and a silver medal in 1921. He also was awarded the California Art Club’s Ackerman prize in 1918.

Pushman’s artistic identity began to take shape after he opened his own studio in 1921. Robert-Fleury, upon seeing one of Pushman’s early studio still lives, advised the artist, “That painting is you.”

Thereafter, Pushman’s career was devoted to one subject, oriental mysticism, and one form, the still life. His paintings typically featured oriental idols, pottery and glassware, all glowing duskily as if illuminated by candlelight. They were symbolic, spiritual paintings, and were sometimes accompanied by readings, which help explain their allegorical significance. Most important, they were exquisitely beautiful, executed with technical precision. When Twilight Comes (date and location unknown) exemplifies the stunning beauty, mysterious mood and impeccable technique that made Pushman’s work so highly respected.

Pushman died in 1966 in New York City.

MEMBERSHIPS
American Art Association of Paris
California Art Club
Salmagundi Club

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Detroit Institute of Arts
Houston Art Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Milwaukee Art Institute, Wisconsin
Minneapolis Art Museum, Minnesota
Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
New Britain Institute, Connecticut
Norfolk Art Association, Virginia
Philbrook Art Center, Tulsa
Rockford Art Guild, Illinois
San Diego Fine Arts Society
Seattle Art Museum