In Grand Style at the Renwick

Step into grand style in the Renwick's newly refurbished Grand Salon.

William Bradford's Whaler off the Vineyard is one of the more than 150 nineteenth-century paintings on display in this luxurious nineteenth-century salon. The Renwick Gallery is located at 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, across from the White House.

Born near New Bedford, a Massachusetts seaport whose whaling industry reached its peak in the 1850s, William Bradford became internationally acclaimed for his many views of the Arctic. While other artists in the 1860s and 1870s traveled to record the vastness and grandeur of the American West, he chose to sail and explore the northern reaches.… In these works, he depicts the often startling clarity and special effects of northern light, the still and frozen vastness, the isolation of people who live amid physically and spiritually overpowering mountains of ice and glacial seas.

Source: National Museum of American Art (CD-ROM) (New York and Washington D.C.: MacMillan Digital in cooperation with the National Museum of American Art, 1996).

Pictured: William Bradford, 1823–92, Whaler off the Vineyard—Outward Bound, 1859, oil on fiberboard, 16 x 24 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase.