Ep. 133: William Bradford

Welcome, Kyle DeCiccio-Carey to In-Focus Podcast Number 132! Kyle is the Library Director at the Millicent Library in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, and speaks with us about celebrated Fairhaven resident and painter Lemuel D. Eldred.

This is the second of five, Fairhaven Cultural Council grant-supported podcasts with Kyle who will be telling us about some of the town's artists from days gone by. Lemuel Eldred is a great artist to begin this mini-series of podcasts!

William Bradford was born in Fairhaven in 1823. He developed an interest in painting as a young man and taught himself to draw by copying drawings from a book of illustrations repeatedly. In the early 1850s, he started his own clothing retail store in New Bedford. However, his art distracted him from his business which eventually failed.

He took lessons with Albertus van Beest, a Dutch painter living in New Bedford, and set up a studio on Union Street in Fairhaven. After a small success in selling paintings of boats, he opened a studio in Boston.

Bradford had been inspired to visit the Arctic and after he found success in Boston he was able to finance several trips to Labrador in the 1860s. In 1869, he went further north along Greenland taking photographers with him.

In 1873, he published an account of the voyage using photographs to illustrate the volume. He would use the photographs of the seascapes taken in the Arctic as a guide to creating paintings. He noted that despite the power of the camera to photograph the terrain, the "glorious phases of color remain unexpressed" until he painted what the camera had captured.

His work may be seen at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, and Harvard University's Art Museum.

The Artists Index podcasts are part of the continuing history of the area's art and culture. The podcasts are a record of this creative community's artists. They are an excellent resource for everyone; artists, art educators, art industry professionals, scholars, genealogists, and, non-artists as well.

Music courtesy of www.bensound.com