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.

 

 Blue Hill Bay Gallery   11 Tenney Hill, Blue Hill, Maine 04614