Biography from Turak Gallery of American Art:
| Robert Bruce Crane was born in New York City on October 17, 1857. The
son of Solomon Bruce Crane and Leah Gillespie, he was educated in New
York's public schools and was exposed to the city's galleries and
museums by his father, himself an amateur painter. By the age of
seventeen, Crane had moved to Elizabeth, New Jersey, where he was
employed as a draftsman by an architect and builder.
He soon
decided to devote his career to painting, and about 1876 or 1877 sought
the guidance of the landscape painter Alexander H. Wyant, with whom he
subsequently shared a close friendship until Wyant's death in 1892.
Between
1878 and 1882, Crane attended the Art Students League in New York and
traveled to Europe for further study. In the United States during this
period, he painted in New Jersey; East Hampton, Long Island; and the
Adirondacks. He wrote to his father from the Adirondacks that among the
influential painters working nearby at the time were Eastman Johnson,
George and James Smillie, and Samuel Coleman, and he described the
dramatic terrain: "Went to the famous Rainbow Falls which several
artists have tried to paint . . . Wyant and Hart among them . . . over
the top comes tumbling the water which strikes every few feet throwing
a spray which catches the sun giving a most charming as well as
wonderful appearance."
Crane spent time in East Hampton, on the
eastern end of Long Island, during the summer of 1880 or 1881 and
possibly during other summers. From there he wrote his father that the
painters "Stimson, Dellenbaugh, Moran, Robbins and Coleman are here . .
. I have finished the study of an old house . . . and the artists say
that [it] is exceedingly good." In another note he described some of
his typical subjects at this time: "I have been working on a 20 x 30
[inch] subject, a row of apple trees, gigantic in size . . . I commence
in a few days the study sheep."
In these early works, Crane
painstakingly reproduced the pastures, hayfields, and barnyards of
rural East Hampton. A critic later remarked that "Troubled or placid
skies, the bright luminous atmosphere of a summer's day, or the gray
tones of autumn were given in these pictures, not only with truth to
nature and a certain poetic sentiment, but with a brilliant sparkling
quality of effect.
Source:
Clark, Charles Teaze; "Bruce Crane, Tonalist Painter", Antiques Magazine, November, 1982.
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Biography from AskART:
| A popular landscape painter, especially of golden toned landscapes that
conveyed fall and winter seasons, Bruce Crane, also a teacher, was strongly influenced
by the French Barbizon school of painting and had a studio for many
years in Old Lyme, Connecticut. He also painted on Long Island, the
Catskills, and the Adirondacks. In 1882, he was in France at the colony
at Grez-sur-Loring with Birge Harrison, Kenyon Cox, and Alexander
Wyant, but he maintained a studio in New York City until he moved to
Bronxville in 1914.
He took early art lessons from Alexander
Wyant in New York City and then studied in Europe. He became a member
of the National Academy of Design, the American Water Color Society,
the Salmagundi Club, the Society of American Artists, and the Grand
Central Art Galleries. One of his great admirers was J. Francis Murphy
with whom his work has often been compared.
Source:
David Michael Zellman, Three Hundred Years of American Art
Peter Falk, Who Was Who in American Art
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Bruce Crane is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Old Lyme Colony Painters
Tonalism
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