William Partridge Burpee (1846–1940)

About the Artist

William Partridge Burpee was born in Rockland, Maine, on April 13, 1846, to Nathaniel A. and Mary Partridge Burpee. He was educated in Rockland schools and in the Kents Hill Academy in Readfield, Maine. He exhibited a great deal of interest as a youth in painting and drawing, and he received his formal training from the marine painter William Bradford (1823–1894), in the 1870s. Burpee’s early work of the 1880s reflects Bradford’s influence as well as the influence of other painters such as Fitz Hugh Lane, Frederic Edwin Church, Martin Johnson Heade, F. A. Silva and A. T. Bricher.

After briefly advertising himself as an artist in the Rockland City Directory in 1882, Burpee appeared that year in Boston. By September 1, 1885, he was painting figures on Lynn Beach, Massachusetts, between Nahant and Swampscott in a style that now reflected the influence of French painting—particularly Eugene Boudin and Emile Louis Vernier. He showed life of the beach with children at play, dorymen, lobstermen, netmenders, women waiting for the return of the boats, clamdiggers, and drying and folding sails. He began exhibiting in Boston in 1881 (Massachusetts Charitable Mechanics Association) and soon became a regular exhibitor (1890) and a member (1894) of the Boston Art Club. Until his trip abroad, Burpee maintained a position in bookkeeping and accounting.

In 1897, Burpee left Boston to tour Spain, Italy, France, and England. He returned to the United States in 1899 and the next year went back to Europe to spend the summer in Holland. After his international travel and visits to the salons in Paris, he became much more international in his viewpoint, and his style became much more impressionistic. During the summer in Holland, he discovered pastel and soon developed a great facility and liking for the medium.

He was honored at the St. Louis Exposition of 1904 with a bronze medal for pastel. He also exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Corcoran Gallery, Washington D.C.; the American Watercolor Society; the L. D. M. Sweat Museum (now Portland Museum of Art); the Boston Society of Watercolor Painters; and the Copley Society, Boston.

After living in Boston for nearly 25 years, where he had a studio in the Harcourt Studio Building (until it burned in 1904), he returned to Rockland in 1913, where he spent the rest of his life. He began visiting Monhegan in the early 1900s, working in an impressionist style in oil and with pastel crayons that he made himself.

His work is in the permanent collections of the Monhegan Museum of Art and History; Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Massachusetts; the Rockland Public Library, Cheekwood, Nashville, Tennessee; Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, South Carolina; the Louisiana State University Museum of Art; the William A. Farnsworth Museum, Rockland, Maine; and the Portland Museum of Art, Maine. For more information see: William Partridge Burpee: American Marine Impressionist by D. Roger Howlett. Burpee is also one of the seven “Lynn Beach Painters” described in the 1994 book, The Lynn Beach Painters: Art Along the North Shore 1880–1920, also by Howlett.

Source: Childs Gallery, Rizolli Electa, New York