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Patrick Henry Bruce (March 25, 1881 – November 12, 1936) was an Americancubist painter.
A descendant ofPatrick Henry, Bruce was born inCampbell County, Virginia, the second of four children.[1] His family had once owned a huge plantation,Berry Hill, worked by over 3,000slaves. Berry Hill Estate originally was part of a 105,000-acre (420 km2) tract granted by the English Crown in 1728 to William Byrd II. (Berry Hill is now a resort and conference center outsideSouth Boston, Virginia and is a National Historic Landmark.) TheCivil War left the Bruces' wealth greatly diminished. Bruce began taking evening classes at the Art Club ofRichmond in 1898, while working in a real estate office during the daytime. His earliest known extant painting dates from 1900.[1]
In 1902 he moved to New York, where he studied withWilliam Merritt Chase,Robert Henri, andKenneth Hayes Miller. By February 1904 he was in Paris, where he would live until 1933. Although his evolution toward a modernist style was gradual, his works of 1908 reveal the influence ofRenoir andCézanne, and in that year he was among the first to enroll inMatisse's school.[2]
Bruce exhibited regularly in theSalon d'Automne, and met many of the leading artists of the early twentieth centuryavant garde. During a period of close friendship withSonia andRobert Delaunay during 1912–1914 his paintings were influenced byOrphism, but Bruce never formed an attachment to any school. Although he never exhibited with the Synchromists or gave his paintings Synchromist titles,[3] in 1916 he developed a form of abstract painting that strongly resembledMorgan Russell's synchromist compositions of muscular, flat color areas (for example, see Bruce'sComposition I).[4]
The style of his mature work anticipated thePurism developed byLéger andOzenfant in the 1920s. In his paintings of 1918 and later, hard-edged geometric forms are arranged as on a tabletop and rendered in evenly applied, flat colors. His work was admired byMarcel Duchamp[5] and may have influenced the style adopted by his former teacher, Matisse, in hismuralLa Danse (1932–33, in theBarnes Foundation,Merion, Pennsylvania).[6]
Intensely self-critical, Bruce destroyed a great many of his paintings, and only about one hundred works remain. He committed suicide with the drugVeronal[7] in New York City on November 12, 1936.
