William Blair Bruce

William Blair Bruce

William Blair Bruce (born October 8, 1859 in Hamilton , Ontario , Canada , † November 17, 1906 in Stockholm , Sweden ) was a Canadian painter . After several years in France, he settled in Sweden with his wife Carolina Benedicks-Bruce . He was one of the early Canadian Impressionist painters .

Life

William Blair Bruce was born in Hamilton, Ontario in 1859 . His parents William Bruce and Janet Blair came to Canada as immigrants from Scotland . They recognized their son's artistic talent early on and his father gave him drawing lessons. After finishing school, William Blair Bruce first studied law at the Hamilton Collegiate Institute , but shortly afterwards switched to studying architecture at the Mechanics' Institute in his hometown. He also worked in Hamilton for the architect James Balfour .

After William Blair Bruce had already received lessons in watercolor and oil painting from Henry Martin (1832-1904) in Hamilton, his parents financed him in 1881 to study in France. He attended the Académie Julian in Paris and took lessons from the painters William Adolphe Bouguereau and Tony Robert-Fleury , who taught him the basics of academic painting . In 1882 Bruce made his debut at the Paris Salon with the painting Une lisière de la forêt - matin . In his early paintings, taken in France, Bruce took inspiration from the painters of the Barbizon School . In Barbizon in 1882 he rented a house, devoted himself to outdoor painting and mainly created landscape paintings. He also visited Grez-sur-Loing , where he met Swedish painters such as Carl Larsson , his wife Karin , Bruno Liljefors and August Strindberg . At international exhibitions, for example those of the London Royal Academy of Arts , he tried to find success with large-format paintings and, for example, was able to convince critics in the Paris Salon in 1884 with the picture Temps passe . Despite this recognition, he ran into financial difficulties a little later. After a nervous breakdown, he returned to Canada to recover in the fall of 1885. He planned to show his pictures there at exhibitions in Toronto , Hamilton and London . The 200 paintings intended for this by Bruce, however, were lost when the cargo ship SS City of Brooklyn sank on November 8, 1885 off the island of Anticosti in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence .

Before he left, Bruce met the Swedish sculptor Carolina Benedicks in France . She and her uncle visited him in Canada in 1886. Bruce and Benedicks became engaged in Hamilton and returned to France in late 1886. Bruce first settled in Barbizon again, then moved to Giverny in May 1887 . Here, at Claude Monet's place of residence , the American painter Theodore Robinson founded an artists' colony. In Giverny Bruce developed an impressionistic style of painting with colorful landscape motifs such as The Bridge on the Limetz or the Rainbow .

William Blair Bruce: The Phantom Hunter

In 1888 Bruce created one of his most famous paintings in France, The Phantom Hunter . The motif was based on the poem Walker of the Snow by the writer Charles Dawson Shanly and shows a man in a snowy landscape to whom a ghost appears. Through the realistic depiction of the hunter and the freer way of painting the landscape, Bruce combined the two stylistic devices that were decisive for his work in this painting. He tried to win an international audience with this North American winter scene and with the subject he met the patriotic demands of the Canadian press that the country's artists should deal with topics from their homeland. After Bruce exhibited the painting The Phantom Hunter in the Paris Salon of 1888, he received favorable reviews, especially in Canadian newspapers.

William Blair Bruce: Open Air Studio

In May 1888, William Blair Bruce and his wife stayed for three months in Visby on the Swedish island of Gotland . He devoted himself to marine painting and created numerous sketches, including preparatory work for his painting The Mediterranean near Toulon - Time of the Mistral, shown in the Paris Salon in 1896 . On December 5, 1888, Bruce married Carolina Benedicks in Stockholm. It became his preferred model in the following years. From this marriage there was a daughter who, however, died as a toddler. The couple initially settled in Saint-Nazaire , France , but returned to Grez-sur-Loing in May 1889, where Bruce painted several pictures in the Impressionist style. This includes the painting open-air studio , in which he shows his wife drawing on the terrace of their house. The view goes from an interior to the garden, whereby the picture cleverly combines the subjects interior , genre scene , still life and landscape . In Grez-sur-Loing, the American painter Walter Gay visited the couple, who bought several paintings by Bruce. Bruce and his wife lived in Grez-sur-Loing until 1894. During this time both traveled repeatedly to Paris and southern France, visiting Rome , Venice and the island of Capri . In Paris, the couple moved into an apartment in the bohemian Cité Fleurie in 1894 . In 1895 they both left for a short visit to Canada, where they visited Hamilton and Bruce painted portraits of Iroquois in the Six Nations of the Grand River reservation .

Bruce and his wife lived permanently on the Swedish island of Gotland from 1900 . They had acquired a property north of Visby which they called Brucebo and which they expanded considerably by 1906. In the winter of 1903/1904 the couple visited Corsica . In the last years of his life he created numerous works with Swedish motifs, including views of the Baltic Sea and folkloric scenes. On November 17, 1906, William Blair Bruce died of a heart attack in Stockholm at the age of 47 . He was buried in the Väskinde cemetery on Gotland. The Brucebo house is now an artists' museum with the works of Bruce and his wife. She donated 29 paintings by William Blair Bruce to his hometown Hamilton. This Bruce Collection served as the basis of today's Art Gallery of Hamilton . Bruce's work influenced a number of Canadian artists, including Albert H. Robinson and Maurice Galbraith Cullen .

Works in public collections (selection)

Interior view of Brucebo with paintings by William Blair Bruce

• The Royal Palace in Stockholm , Swedish National Museum , Stockholm
• The Departure of the Ship , National Museum of Sweden, Stockholm
• Morning Fog , National Museum of Sweden, Stockholm
• The White Steamer , National Museum of Sweden, Stockholm
• On the Quay , National Museum of Sweden, Stockholm
• On Skeppsbron, Stockholm , Swedish National Museum, Stockholm
• Carboys , Swedish National Museum, Stockholm
• Hoar-frost , Swedish National Museum, Stockholm
• Pine trees in the snow , Swedish National Museum, Stockholm
• The Big Cloud , Swedish National Museum, Stockholm
• Blowing Mistral , Swedish National Museum, Stockholm
• Open air studio , Swedish National Museum, Stockholm
• Marine , Musée d'Orsay , Paris
• Setting Moon, Brucebo , National Gallery of Canada , Ottawa
• Bathing Woman, Capri , National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
• The Smiths , National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
• Joy of the Nereids , National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
• Sunset, Barbizon, France , Museum London , London (Ontario)
• Harvest Time , Agnes Etherington Art Center , Kingston, Ontario
• Landscape with Poppies , Art Gallery of Ontario , Toronto
• The Phantom Hunter and 28 other paintings, Art Gallery of Hamilton , Hamilton (Ontario)
• Numerous works in the Brucebo artist house on Gotland

literature

• Bruce, William Blair . In: Ulrich Thieme (Hrsg.): General Lexicon of Fine Artists from Antiquity to the Present . Founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker . tape 5 : Brewer-Carlingen . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1911, p. 93 ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
• Tobi Bruce, Michelle Facos: Into the Light: The Paintings of William Blair Bruce (1859-1906). Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton 2014, ISBN 1-907804-52-8 .
• Paul Duval: Canadian Impressionism. M & S, Toronto 1990, ISBN 0-7710-2964-0 .
• Arlene Gehmacher: William Blair Bruce: painting for posterity. Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton 2000, ISBN 0-919153-63-1 .
• Carol Lowrey: Visions of light and air, Canadian impressionism, 1885-1920. Americas Society Art Gallery, New York 1995 ISBN 1-879128-12-8
• Joan Murray: Impressionism in Canada, 1895-1935. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto 1973
• Joan Murray (Ed.): Letters home, 1859-1906: The letters of William Blair Bruce. Penumbra Press, Moonbeam 1982 ISBN 0-920806-36-8
• Ash K. Prakash Ed .: Impressionism in Canada. A Journey of Rediscovery. Vorw. Guy Wildenstein, Einf. William H Gerdts. Arnoldsche Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart 2014, 2nd ed. 2015 (illustrated book with explanations. A chapter on Blair Bruce. Photo Red Rock, St. Nazaire . 1889, on the publisher's page, below )

Web links

Commons : William Blair Bruce  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Entry on William Blar Bruce in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography