Bennett Bradbury

229705 NaPali Kauai III

907989 Leeward Oahu

Oil on Canvas

Bennett Bradbury was born in Wrentham, Massachusetts on February 23, 1914. He was the offspring of one of the more musical families of America at that time. His mother Elfrida Schroeder, was a grand opera star of the Boston Opera Company, and his maternal grandfather was Alwin Schroeder, acclaimed as a cellist.

Being raised and educated with such prestigious surroundings - Rachmaninoff, Kriesler, Paderewski, Horowitz and other famous personalities, Bradbury 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 Bostom 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, which of course, was the sea.

During the following years, Bradbury achieved much attention for his art career, one that spanned 50 years.

Bennett Bradbury died in his beloved Carmel, California at age of 77.

The view that Bradbury is considered a leading artist of his time is reinforced by Mr. Erwin Barrie, manager of Grand Central Galleries, for over a half a century. He said that Bradbury is "the greatest living painter of the seas. . . . 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."