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拍品專文
A masterwork of American watercolor painting, Alfred Thompson Bricher's A Pensive Moment was painted around 1875-1880, at a time in the artist's career when he created some of his finest works in the medium. With virtuoso technique, Bricher incorporates a single figure into a classic seaside composition for which he is so celebrated. The artist fills the open sky with a brilliant sense of light, an artistic device recalling the luminist paintings that Bricher painted so effectively throughout his lifetime.
In his authoritative volume on the history of American drawings and watercolors, Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. has written, "Bricher was a journeyman landscape and marine painter, yet also an active member of the Water Color Society who could rise to real heights in this medium. A Pensive Moment is worthy of Winslow Homer: drawn well, executed largely in wet washes with considerable use of pink and white body color (or gouache') in the woman's dress, it echoes the internal loneliness of the era." (American Master Drawings and Watercolors: A History of Works on Paper from Colonial Times to the Present, New York, 1976, p. 167)
Jeffrey Brown has written, "The watercolor A Pensive Moment is perhaps the most successful of these paintings of women in nature. Organized by the controlling eye of the painter, the subject is more than a nostalgic tonal photograph. It becomes instead a general statement synthesizing the sentimental attitude of the time. The boat and rigging are bound into position with the shadows and seaweed by a subtle arrangement of interlocking triangles and right angles. For A T. Bricher, carefully constructed composition is always an underlying, and sometimes too obvious strength. . . But in a painting such as A Pensive Moment, the compositional force lends a musical relation to the forms which exhale the odor of the salt sea air and recall some characteristic features, forms and attitudes at summer watering places.'" (Alfred Thomson Bricher, Indianapolis, Indiana, 1973, pp 25-26.)
In his authoritative volume on the history of American drawings and watercolors, Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. has written, "Bricher was a journeyman landscape and marine painter, yet also an active member of the Water Color Society who could rise to real heights in this medium. A Pensive Moment is worthy of Winslow Homer: drawn well, executed largely in wet washes with considerable use of pink and white body color (or gouache') in the woman's dress, it echoes the internal loneliness of the era." (American Master Drawings and Watercolors: A History of Works on Paper from Colonial Times to the Present, New York, 1976, p. 167)
Jeffrey Brown has written, "The watercolor A Pensive Moment is perhaps the most successful of these paintings of women in nature. Organized by the controlling eye of the painter, the subject is more than a nostalgic tonal photograph. It becomes instead a general statement synthesizing the sentimental attitude of the time. The boat and rigging are bound into position with the shadows and seaweed by a subtle arrangement of interlocking triangles and right angles. For A T. Bricher, carefully constructed composition is always an underlying, and sometimes too obvious strength. . . But in a painting such as A Pensive Moment, the compositional force lends a musical relation to the forms which exhale the odor of the salt sea air and recall some characteristic features, forms and attitudes at summer watering places.'" (Alfred Thomson Bricher, Indianapolis, Indiana, 1973, pp 25-26.)