"A meticulous realism, from the American West to the banks of the Seine."
An American painter born in Los Angeles in 1931 and died in Mariposa (California) in 2018, John A. Bruce trained at the Art Center School and the Chouinard Art Institute before a long career as an art director and illustrator. He then devoted himself fully to painting and became a master of realism, celebrated for his meticulous, colourful depictions of the American West — riders and Native American figures — which earned him numerous honours and a place in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution. Alongside this frontier imagery, Bruce turned his precise gaze to other geographies: his views of Paris and the Seine, marked by the same rigour of execution, reveal a painter attentive to the light and atmosphere of cities. It is these Parisian landscapes that place him within the exhibition's narrative.