Nelson, Bruce (1888-1971)

A rare work by Bruce Nelson, who was born in Santa Clara, California in 1888 and spent most of his life in California. In 1905 he attended Stanford University as an engineering student, later changing his major to architecture. When he graduated from college he worked as an architect in San Francisco.

Nelson then traveled to New York to study at the Art Students’ League in New York City, spending his summers painting with tonalist Birge Harrison. It wasn’t until 1912 that he returned to San Francisco where he had a solo exhibition at the Helgesen Galleries in 1914. He set up a studio in Pacific Grove, California, where he painted coastal landscapes and seascapes. Critics ranked him among the best of the early California impressionists.

He earned a silver medal for his work at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco during 1915. Highly lauded for his sensitive portrayals of the California countryside, his impressionistic landscapes were widely collected and he seemed to have taken his place among the very finest of California’s plein air painters. After serving in World War I, Nelson abruptly moved back to New York, and little is known about his further involvement in art during the last twenty-five years of his life.

His disappearance from the California scene has long been considered a mystery.

Source: Edan Hughes, “Artists in California, 1786-1940”