Alden Bryan Profile

Alden Bryan (1913 – 2001) Originally from Missouri, Harvard-educated in economics, an avid sailor and tennis player, Alden Bryan married  Mary Taylor, a sculpture student, and a year later they sailed into Gloucester Harbor, providing them with their first glimpse of working landscape artists. 

Subsequently studying with Emile Gruppe in Gloucester, Bryan went to Vermont in 1939 to study painting with Charles Curtis Allen, N.A..  Shortly thereafter, the Bryans settled on a dairy farm in Jeffersonville, where he introduced pasteurized milk to the area. Establishing a bakery, restaurant and inn, designing the base lodge of Smugglers Notch Resort, building the first indoor tennis center in Vermont, throughout a lifetime of varied achievements, Bryan painted.  Every summer the Bryans returned to their studio and art gallery in Rocky Neck, Gloucester where he was the proprietor of the Rudder Restaurant for 25 years.

Bryan painted in more than 25 countries, ranging from Katmandu to Cape Horn, Africa, to the Antarctic, Hong Kong and Indonesia.  He held memberships in many art organizations including the American Watercolor Society, the Salmagundi Club, Allied Artists of America, American Artists Professional League, Grand Central Art Association and the North Shore Arts Association.

It was in Vermont, and in the old city of Quebec, and on the Massachusetts seacoast where Bryan’s command of painting produced his most compelling works.  Over 1,000 paintings cover the changes in the local farmland of Vermont, and in the waterfront docks, recording the transformation from the age of sail to the age of steam. 

When Mary Bryan died in 1978, Alden Bryan set out to build a gallery in her memory, giving mortar and design to a spirit the Bryans had nurtured for over 30 years.  Inviting the best artists he knew to exhibit, the non-profit gallery on Main Street in Jeffersonville became a magnet for painters who lived the artistic legacy of Lamoille County, Vermont. 

The area’s unfettered vistas and local population welcomed the artists, and then left them alone.  Seeking that particular moment of light and characteristic of season, the camaraderie of painters, painting in Vermont has produced master painters in every generation for over one hundred years. 

Bryan Memorial Gallery celebrated the 100th birthday of its founder, Alden Bryan with an exhibition of his paintings in 2013, painted in 26 countries over a span of 60 years (early 1940’s until his death in 2001.)

Alden Bryan’s love of the landscape was vivid and instantaneous.  Working en plein air (in natural light,) he traveled with canvas boards, paints and brushes, and his approach to discovering a new land was to paint it with immediacy and enthusiasm.

His travels took him throughout Europe, North America, the Far East, and Down Under, but even at home in Vermont, he never stopped traveling and painting.

Scenes of the local Main Streets and town squares that are now historic records of an era that remains alive on canvas.

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