Alden Bryan
Alden Bryan (May 3, 1913 – March 27, 2001) was a mid-Century American artist best known for his oil paintings of Vermont, New England, and international destinations. Originally from Carthage, Missouri, he is most readily associated with Vermont and Massachusetts, where he established galleries and restaurants.
Bryan and his wife, artist Mary Bryan, established the Bryan Gallery on Rocky Neck, Gloucester, MA in an old paint factory, which they ran during the summer for 30 years (1946 – 1976.) After Mary Bryan died in 1978, Bryan established Mary Bryan Memorial Gallery in 1984, which he designed and built on Main Street in Jeffersonville, VT in the Jeffersonville Historical District of the National Register of Historic Places. Since its founding, the non-profit Gallery has shown an uninterrupted schedule of contemporary and historic landscape painting exhibitions, specializing in New England landscapes.
Bryan combined his painting career with his love of travel and amassed thousands of his paintings from 26 countries. Uncomfortable with selling his work during his lifetime, Bryan Memorial Gallery Foundation now holds a repository of his work.
Bryan also made many contributions to the livelihood and circumstances of the Jeffersonville area, instructing local dairy farms in the process of pasteurizing milk, establishing a restaurant, a bakery, and an inn, all of which continue beyond his lifetime.
Early life and education
Alden Bryan was born in 1913, son of Millard and Pauline Kirke Bryan.[1] During his childhood, the family undertook many summer trips to New England, most especially the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Bryan was familiar with New England by the time he was accepted into Harvard for his undergraduate study in Economics, where he also was on the Harvard Tennis Team. When he graduated, he became the tennis pro at the Eastern Yacht Club in Marblehead, Massachusetts, where he met Mary Lewis Taylor. They married in 1936 and their son, Alden Taylor Bryan was born in 1937.
The Bryans spent the earliest years of their marriage sailing, young son in tow, in their schooner Adventure. Their travels took them to Gloucester, Massachusetts where they became attracted to the artist colony atmosphere of galleries and artists at their easels outdoors. As natural as it was for Mary Bryan to be among artists, for Alden Bryan, doing so appealed to his investigative nature. He took part in the many painting workshops offered on Cape Ann, studying with Aldro Hibbard (1886-1972,) Emile Gruppe (1896-1978,) and Charles Curtis Allen (1886-1950.) Bryan even shared instructor responsibilities with Hibbard when the master was not up to his teaching schedule en plein air.[2] It was Allen who suggested Bryan participate in an intensive plein air painting workshop in Jeffersonville, VT in the winter of 1939, a trip that changed the course of his life.
Within a year, the Bryans had settled into what was to be their lifelong residence on a dairy farm in Jeffersonville. When he was not painting, he was improving the rural dairy experience by instructing the local farmers in the pasteurization of milk. He and Mary established the Windridge Farms Dairy Kitchen and Coffee Shop at 158 Main[3] Street, and products from their bakery were delivered all over Vermont. Later, they established an inn next door on Main Street, that eventually included a prix fixe restaurant, Cheval d’Or.[4] Bryan's interest in his community and in painting combined to channel his energies and sense of responsibility. He preserved countless buildings in the Jeffersonville area, and built new ones, designing the base lodge at Smugglers' Notch Resort and the Windridge Tennis Camp (now the Community Center.)[1]
Artistic Style
The local ambiance worked its way into his paintings, which serve as direct reportage of complex scenes, many demolished or inaccessible now. Be they Gloucester Harbor, Mount Mansfield or a marketplace in Senegal, there is a straightforward approach in his work, revealing what he often said, that “My education never began until I got to Jeffersonville.”[5]
A major component of Alden Bryan’s oeuvre as a painter was his personal enjoyment of travel.[6] Painting provided an enhanced way to visit new locations, often in his own schooner or later, in the Traveler, a motor vessel, berthed in Gloucester, behind the Bryan Gallery. The Bryans would sail for a month at a time – to the Panama Canal, Jamaica, the West Indies, Bermuda. On other trips to England, Alaska, British Columbia, France, Italy, Senegal and Singapore, someone else sailed the vessel. Everywhere the Bryans went, they painted. [2] For Alden Bryan, painting provided an ironic solace from the fast pace of his life in Vermont. Every March he painted in close-by Quebec City and most of the rest of the year, he painted in Vermont.[7] [8] He built up a large repertoire of paintings of Vermont farms and farming in all seasons, except summer when he said, according to his family, “Vermont was too green to paint.” The evidence is to the contrary, however, as Bryan's work hangs in the Vermont State House Governor's working office (Pavillion Building) and can be viewed behind the Governor during press conferences.[9][10]
Alden Bryan's reticence to sell his work combined with many other labor-intensive activities limited the demand for his work during his lifetime. Further, a rural Vermont artist’s way of life is keenly significant to his story. Though the Bryans traveled extensively, their opportunities to exhibit were curtailed to local art associations or leagues, limiting their national recognition. It was not until after his death that a genuine groundswell of inquiry revealed what he had been painting all those years.
Prizes and Memberships
A major influence on his work was his camaraderie with other artists whose approval he appreciated, especially when it involved awards. Bryan received first prize for an oil painting in an exhibition at the North Shore Arts Association, which also awarded him the William Publicover prize for watercolor. The watercolor award was a particular irony as Bryan was not inclined to paint in watercolor, doing so with the goal of being accepted into the American Watercolor Society.[11] When he achieved that goal, he gave up watercolor and painted in oil for the rest of his life.[12]
The Rockport Art Association gave Bryan a Best in Show Award, and other arts organizations that bestowed prizes on his work included the Silvermine Guild (CT), the Academic Artists Association (CT,) the Salmagundi Club (NYC.)[13]
Legacy and Death
Soon after Mary Bryan’s death in 1978, their friend and neighbor Jane George mounted an exhibit of works by Thomas Curtin (1899-1977,) a local artist who had died recently. The response to the show was beyond expectation, and Alden Bryan seized its momentum. He designed and built Mary Bryan Memorial Gallery as a tribute to his late wife, with the specified intention of providing a show place for the many artists who came annually to paint in Jeffersonville, just as he and Mary had done 40 years prior. He engineered a hanging system for the gallery which streamlined the installation and removal of artwork. Interior walls were hung from channels for easy re-configuration of the Gallery space, and a central skylight ran the length of the ceilings.
Open continually since 1984, and enlarged in 1991, the Gallery’s mission highlights contemporary and historic landscape painting, with a particular focus on practice in Vermont and New England. Over 200 artists exhibit in one or more of eleven exhibitions annually.[3]
Since 2010, the Mary and Alden Bryan Fund of the Vermont Community Foundation has offered the Alden Bryan Medal for excellence in oil painting, awarded annually through ten regional visual art organizations in New England and New York.
Alden Bryan died in 2001, and is buried next to his wife, Mary Bryan, in the Mountain View Cemetery, Waterville, Vermont.[14]
Reference
- ↑ Bryan, Alden (July 22, 2021). "Family Search". Family Search. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ Swink, Sylvan Steele (1958). Cape Ann Profile. Utica, New York: Swink. Search this book on
- ↑ Main, 158 (July 22, 2021). "158 Main". 158 Main. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ d'Or, Cheval (July 22, 2021). "At the Nation's Table Jeffersonville". NY Times. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ Bryan, Alden (August 2013). "Travels with Alden" (PDF). Bryan Memorial Gallery. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ Smuggs (2013). "Travels with Alden" (PDF). Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ Myers, Mickey (May 29, 2013). "Travels with Alden". Resource Library. Retrieved July 22, 2021. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ Myers, Mickey (July 1, 2014). "Mary and Alden Bryan". American Art Review. XXVI #3 2014: 92–103.
- ↑ Gruhler, Paul (curator) (2008). The Art of Vermont: The State Collection (catalogue). Vermont Council on the Arts. Search this book on
- ↑ Myers, Mickey (August 28, 2008). "The Art of Vermont". The Traditional Fine Arts Organization Resource Library. American Art Review August 28, 2008.
- ↑ Fabri, Ralph (1969). History of the American Watercolor Society: The First 100 Years. American Watercolor Society. Search this book on
- ↑ Myers, Mickey (2011). ""Masters of Vermont: The Watercolorists"" (PDF). American Art Review XXIII #4. Bryan Gallery. Retrieved October 27, 2021. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ Gow, Mary (November 21, 2020). "Vermont Landsape Painting Mecca". Rutland Herald. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ Cemetery, Mountain View (2001). "Find a Grave". Find a Grave. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help)
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