A pioneer in the development of abstract painting, Patrick Henry Bruce focused on the still life in his explorations of the boundary between representation and “pure” painting. Bruce was a descendent of American statesman Patrick Henry (1736–1799). He began his art studies at the Richmond Art School at the age of sixteen. In 1902 he moved to New York to study with the celebrated teacher and painter William Merritt Chase and then Robert Henri, a progressive artist who encouraged his students to develop an independent artistic voice. Late in 1903, Bruce moved to Paris.
Bruce’s early work, which he exhibited in both Paris and the United States, was dominated by figure studies and portraits painted with rich impasto and loose brushwork. Around 1907, however, his encounters with modernist artists and intellectuals led to radical changes in his work. Beginning in 1908 he studied with Henri Matisse (1869–1854), assimilating the French artist’s use of brilliant color, decorative patterning, and rich, tactile paint. Matisse introduced Bruce to the work of French artist Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), whose emphasis on the geometric structure of forms in nature was deeply influencing a younger generation of artists as they worked toward abstraction. Under these influences, between 1908 and 1912 Bruce painted numerous still lifes in which forms are broken into planes of strong color in thickly applied pigment.
Beginning in 1912, Bruce turned toward urban imagery after he met American painters Robert (1885–1941) and Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979), leaders of a new movement known as “orphic cubism,” characterized by swirling, circular forms. Exhibited in modernist salons in Paris and in Berlin and subsequently in New York, Bruce’s dynamic, richly colored compositions of the pre-World War I years earned the artist a significant role in the transatlantic development of abstract painting. Around 1916 his work shifted again, toward a new emphasis on geometric forms, hard-edged linearity, and an avoidance of primary colors. In these independent works, ostensibly still lifes, Bruce continued to experiment with the tension between representation and pure composition, and with the effects of juxtaposing contrasting colors in areas of specific size and shape. Based on actual table-top arrangements of food items and everyday and exotic objects he collected, these series of still lifes, on which Bruce worked obsessively, explore the relationships of angles and planes, as well as colors, in pure, volumetric essences of the original forms.
Bruce remained in France throughout his career. Although he had exhibited successfully in both New York and Europe, beginning in the mid-1920s a lack of public understanding of his experimental art, coupled with his aloof personality, poor health, and the failure of his marriage, led to his increasing isolation and frustration. Bruce ceased exhibiting his work in 1930; in 1933, he destroyed many of his paintings and moved to Versailles. Three years later, shortly after he finally returned to the United States, he committed suicide in New York City at the age of fifty-five.
