Patrick Henry Bruce

A descendant of Patrick Henry, the American revolutionary famed for his line, “give me liberty, or give me death!”, Patrick Henry Bruce was born to a Virginia family who lost a great deal of wealth when slavery was abolished and their plantation no longer ran on free labor. Born about two decades after the Civil War, Bruce moved to New York City in his youth to pursue painting. He studied in New York under Robert Henri but shortly moved to Paris where he would live for 30 years and develop his Modernist style initially informed by Paul Cézanne. He enrolled in Henri Matisse’s art school and eventually landed on a cubist style. A stereotypically despondent artist, Henry Bruce destroyed many of his own paintings and tragically committed suicide in 1936.