Sloops and Schooners at Evening Calm

William Bradford went north for his subjects, further north than almost any painter of his generation. He made repeated voyages to Labrador and Greenland from the 1860s, chartering a steamer for one expedition and taking photographers with him to record ice formations. His background was Quaker and maritime, from New Bedford at the height of the whaling trade, which gave him ships and sailors as everyday subjects long before the Arctic work began. The early pictures are harbour scenes, precisely rigged and calmly lit. The ice paintings are the reason he is remembered. Vessels dwarfed by bergs, crews hauling across floes, light doing strange things at high latitude. He published an illustrated account of the 1869 voyage, and Queen Victoria bought one of the resulting canvases, which secured his reputation in Britain.