Robert Bruce Crane Biography | Oil Painting Reproductions

Robert Bruce Crane was taught art by his amateur artist father and he showed his young son the New York art scene. In later years Robert with expectations of beginning a profession in the art field approached the famous artist Alexander Wyant and made a request to begin an apprenticeship with him, he declined. He then spent the following year enhancing his abilities before he showed his work to Wyant again, this time Wyatt accepted and he began to work with him and remained friends until Wyant's death.

Robert Bruce Crane then began to study at the Arts Student League and in 1876 he had his first exhibit at the National Academy of Design in New York, presenting his oil painting Old Swedish Church, Philadelphia. He then began to paint in East Hampton and other areas on Long Island, these paintings would bring him critical approval as well as a steady income.

He then left New York to study in Grez-sur-Loing in France with Jean Charles Cazin, a well-known French Tonalist painter of the nineteenth century. He also experienced success in France.

Unfortunately, Crane's wife Jeanne Bouchard Brainerd was institutionalized in an asylum. Bruce would marry his stepdaughter Ann Brainerd two years later, despite a 25-year age gap and they would have a daughter who they named Ann.

In 1909 he won a bronze medal at the Carnegie Institute Exhibition for his work November Hills. Robert Bruce Crane joined the Lyme Art Colony in the early 1900s. Throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century, Crane won 10 major national and international awards. His most dynamic period, came after 1920 when for more than a decade he did landscape oil paintings of fall and winter scenes. He typically painted in his studio in New York, and like many of the Tonalists, he depended on memories and his outdoor sketches.

Art Movement: Tonalism.
Artists Influencing Robert Bruce Crane: Jean Charles Cazin, Alexander Wyant.
He Traveled To France.
Artist's Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.