Robert Bruce Crane
1857 - 1937

Born in New York City in 1857, Robert Bruce Crane embraced two artistic movements of the late nineteenth century – the Barbizon school and tonalism. By the 1870s, the Barbizon movement had found its way to America where it quickly supplanted the more representational works of the Hudson River School painters. The leading American exponent of the Barbizon School, George Inness, began his artistic career as part of the later Hudson River School, but moved by his preference for what he termed “civilized landscapes” – those that showed signs of human occupation – and his determination to express his religious conversion to the tenets of Emanuel Swedenborg through his art, he soon turned to a more individualized and expressive mode of painting that in many ways prefigured the abstract expressionism of the 20 th century. Young followers like Robert Bruce Crane, while less attracted to the Swedenborgian movement, nevertheless embraced Inness's dictum that “the highest beauty and truest value of landscape painting are in the sentiment and feeling which flows from the mind and heart of the artist.”

Crane studied in Paris in the late 1870s and, on his return to America , began painting landscapes en plain air. He won the Webb Prize given by the Society of American Artists for a Barbizon-style landscape in the 1890s. After 1904, he spent most summers painting at the Old Lyme colony in Connecticut , though it was largely associated with Impressionism. During that period, Crane began to make the turn to tonalism, using beige, russet and brown tones to achieve an autumnal effect in his paintings. In 1915, he joined several other notable landscape painters to establish Twelve Landscape Painters, an organization created for exhibition purposes. He died in Bronxville , New York in 1937.

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