William Partridge Burpee

(American, 1846–1940)

Born in Rockland, Maine, William Burpee was a landscape and figure painter influenced early on by William Bradford and other American marine and landscape artists. In the 1880s, he painted life along Massachusetts beaches, depicting children at play, fishermen, and everyday coastal scenes, showing the influence of French painters like Fitz Hugh Lane, Frederic Edwin Church, Martin Johnson Heade, F. A. Silva and A. T. Bricher.

Burpee traveled through Europe in 1897, discovering pastel and expanding his style, and later exhibited widely. Despite a studio fire in 1904 that destroyed many works, he remained prolific, producing approximately 800 more paintings.

He was honored at the St. Louis Exposition of 1904 with a bronze medal for pastel. He also exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery, Washington D.C., the American Watercolor Society, the L. D. M. Sweat Museum (now Portland Museum of Art), the Boston Society of Watercolor Painters and the Copley Society, Boston.

Burpee is last listed with a Boston address in 1913. He reappears in Rockland in 1914 and is listed as dividing his time from 1927-1933 between Rockland and East Orange, N.J. He died in Rockland, Maine in 1940.

His work is held in major collections including the Portland Museum of Art, Cheekwood, and the Farnsworth Museum, Rockland, Maine.