WILLIAM BRADFORD 1823-1892
Afternoon on the Labrador Coast, 1878
Oil on canvas, 28 X 48" (91.12 x 121.92 cm.)
Signed, lower right
Museum purchase, 975-0-136

William Bradford was raised a Quaker in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, across the harbor from the busy whaling port of New Bedford where, by 1855, he had his own studio. He specialized in ship portraiture done with painstaking detail but with a sensitivity for the effects of light and atmosphere which so occupied the Gloucester, Massachusetts painter, Fitz Hugh Lane, whom Bradford probably knew. By 1861 Bradford had moved to the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York City. There he met Frederic Edwin Church, whose adventurous travels to the Andes, and those of fellow New Bedford artist, Albert Bierstadt, to the American West, must have encouraged Bradford to continue an interest he already had in the Arctic.
In the late spring of 1861, probably well aware of such recently published reports as Arctic Explorations (1857) and After Icebergs with a Painter (1861), as well as the iceberg paintings of Church, Bradford outfitted a twenty-ton schooner and set out for the coast of Labrador.1 For four months he made sketches and photographs, which he later incorporated into paintings of icebergs under glowing Arctic skies, bold Labrador headlands, Eskimos, and polar bears. Such was the success of these pictures that Bradford traveled to the Arctic seven times between 1861 and 1868.
In early July, 1869, he chartered the small whaling steamer, Panther, and set out from St. Johns, Newfoundland, for Greenland. Among the passengers were two Boston photographers, who made collodion plates of icebergs, coastal promontories, and Eskimo villages while Bradford sketched from shipboard and on shore. From this voyage came 125 photographs which illustrated Bradford's book The Arctic Regions, published in London in 1873. Such an ambitious undertaking bears witness to Bradford's goal "to study Nature under the terrible aspects of the Frigid Zone."
Whereas his paintings of the Arctic usually emphasize ships dwarfed by vast icefields and towering icebergs sparkling under glowing skies, the Labrador paintings tend to be scenes of ships, men fishing, and Eskimos in their kayaks. In Afternoon on the Labrador Coast the low horizon makes ship and iceberg into dramatic silhouettes, one brilliant, the other shadowed. The sky provides a background animated with a turbulent mixture of light and dark clouds, with only bits of blue sky showing through. In their multiple activities set in a tranquil seascape, the Labrador paintings are closer to Bradford's earlier harbor scenes. Though painted in a looser manner, they are still far less dramatic than such turbulent seascapes as his Shipwreck off Nantucket (1859-60, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), done very much in the Dutch style, with a dismasted ship amid heaving waves.
By the mid 1870s, Bradford was wintering in New York, summering in New Bedford, painting pictures of the Arctic and giving lectures on the frozen North. These he illustrated with his photographs of the frigid northern wilderness, whose untouched beauty, overwhelming scale, and crystal clear atmosphere continued to provide inspiration for paintings throughout his career.

WILLIAM S. TALBOT