BENNETT BRADBURY
Bennett Bradbury was born in Wrentham, Massachusetts on February 23, 1914. He came into this world as the offspring of one of the most musical families of America:
His mother Elfrida Schroeder, was a grand opera star of the Boston Opera Company,
and his maternal grandfather was Alwin Schroeder, acclaimed as the greatest
cellist of his time.
Bradbury, being brought up and educated with such prestigious artists as
Rachmaninoff, Kriesler, Paderewski, Horowitz and other famous personalities,
he found many avenues within which to express his own natural and somewhat
precocious talents. At age 15 he won a scholarship in painting and drawing
with the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, but with his inherent and overpowering
love of the sea - he dropped his formal studies and joined the Navy in 1931.
Bradbury's subsequent travels gave him ample opportunity to enjoy, observe
and study the fascinating and ever changing moods of the sea and its shores.
He joined Walt Disney Studios and became assistant director after his Navy
duty and later decided to devote himself entirely to painting the sea.
During the following years, Bradbury literally sky-rocketed to fame. After an art career that spanned 50 years Mr. Bradbury died in his beloved Carmel, California at age of 77.
The view that Bradbury is considered by many leading art critics, connoisseurs and collectors of art, as the "greatest living painter of the seas", is reinforced by Mr. Erwin Barrie, manager of Grand Central Galleries, for over a half a century:
"....No one since Winslow Homer and Fredrick J. Waugh has been able to portray on canvas the majesty and power and dignity of the ocean as does Bennett Bradbury, and I consider him to be the greatest living marine painter today." Among the serious collectors of Bradbury’s paintings are such notables as the late Shah of Iran, Huntington Hartford, Joan Fontaine, Paul Getty Jr., Prince Ahmed Bin Salman Al Saud of Saudio Arabia, and opera star Dorothy Kirsten. His paintings hang in boardrooms, executive offices, and lobbies of some of America’s largest corporations, including American Airlines, Pan American Airlines, Northwest Airlines, Lockheed Corp., and Atlantic Richfield. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Cleveland Museum of Fine Arts, and the St. Louis Museum of Art are among the museums which include Bradbury’s works in their permanent collections.