Tom Swimm

"Sunlight In Rockport" Row Boats With Deep Blue Water Reflections Oil Painting

2020

"Portofino Memories," with rippling water reflections below the iconic Portofino harbor is a quintessential example of Tom Swimm's enhanced realism. This colorful oil painting is on ...

"Misty Sunrise" with soft pastels and glowing water reflections in a peaceful harbor is a quintessential example of Tom Swimm's enhanced realism. This colorful oil exhibits all of t...

This wonderful urban landscape painting showed up in our inventory, but we have lost the name of the artist who created it. At any rate, it depicts a train arriving in the station of...

In 1852, twenty-nine year old William Bradford was a failing shopkeeper in Fairhaven, Massachusetts. With a wife and child at home, Bradford, by his own admission, “spent too much time in painting to succeed” in business. Rescued from insolvency by his well-to-do in-laws, this is not the beginning of a narrative that generally leads to a happy ending. Not so with Bradford, who ultimately found international fame and fortune as a painter of arctic seascapes and dramatic marine paintings. William Bradford, the artist, was a lineal descendant of the 17th-century Separatist leader William Bradford, a founder of the Plymouth Plantation, signer of the Mayflower Compact and Governor of the Plymouth Colony. Our Bradford born to a New Bedford ship outfitter in Fairhaven, Massachusetts By the nineteenth century, this line of Bradfords were Quakers, living on the tract purchased nearly two centuries earlier by their pilgrim ancestor. Fairhaven, across the mouth of the Acushnet River from the whaling center of New Bedford was described by a New York journalist in 1857 as “the Brooklyn of New Bedford” (Home Journal, January 3, 1857). Young Bradford displayed an early predilection for the arts, but his Quaker parents were disinclined to support this particular pursuit. After working in his father’s business and then for a dry goods merchant in New Bedford, by 1849 Bradford had set up in New Bedford as a “merchant tailor” offering outfits for “those going to California,” “seamen’s clothing,” custom-tailored “piece goods...