Albion H. Bicknell (1837-1915)

Around 1860, he went abroad to Paris where he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts and worked in the atelier of Thomas Couture. After a two year stay, during which time he also visited Venice, Bicknell returned home and established himself as a portrait and landscape painter at the Studio Building in Boston. 

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Bicknell took part in the annual exhibitions of the Boston Athenaeum and grew close to a group of like-minded artists, including William Morris Hunt and J. Foxcroft Cole, who were drawn to the techniques of the French Barbizon painters and became ardent supporters of their work. In 1866, Hunt and Bicknell, along with several other believers, founded the short-lived Allston Club and organized their first exhibition featuring nearly one hundred paintings, of which more than half were French; Bicknell personally included three pieces by Corot. While the Allston Club had only one more exhibition and dissolved in 1867, many of its members continued producing landscapes in which the effects of light and atmosphere were paramount, thus diverging from the meticulous renditions of the Hudson River School artists and helping to pave the way for the Impressionists.

Bicknell’s paintings garnered praise for their wonderful color and sensitivity to light, revealing the lasting influence of the Barbizon tradition on his work as well as his own interest in the Impressionist movement occurring towards the end of the 19^th century. He held exhibitions at his Malden studio through the 1880s and 1890s, and also showed with the Boston Art Club in 1880, and with Boston dealers Doll & Richards Gallery in 1886 and J. Eastman Chase Gallery in 1889. Furthermore, he was an accomplished etcher, exhibiting his prints at the Union League Club in New York and illustrating writer and critic William Howe Downes’ 1891 book, Arcadian Days: American Landscapes in Nature and Art. Bicknell passed away in Malden in 1915. Today many of his portraits grace the halls of state government buildings and his etchings are found in top museum collections, including Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, yet much of his landscape work remains in private hands or is as yet undiscovered.