Edmund Brucker was active as a portrait painter in Indianapolis from 1938 until his death, and he recorded the likenesses of many prominent people around the state, including Dr. and Mrs. Norris Shreve, Mrs. Otis R. Bowen, and Colonel A. Weir Cook. In 1967, the artist retired from his post of almost thirty years as a professor at the Herron School of Art. Brucker represented a dwindling group of Indiana artists whose rigorous artistic training prepared them for the exactitude of portrait painter.

He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1912. He studied art at the Cleveland School of Art and graduated in 1934. His teachers included Henry Keller, Rolf Stoll, and Paul Travis. In 1938, Brucker joined the faculty of the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he taught until his retirement in the early 1980s. 

Though he was best known as a portrait painter, Brucker was also a painter of the Great Lakes regional scene. Adept in both oil and watercolor, he produced a number of paintings depicting industrial and urban subjects. Many of his works are actually composite scenes formulated from sketches and detailed drawings made at different sites at different times. Brucker's mature realist style emphasizes design, composition and line. His palette is rich in its use of gray tones. 

Brucker exhibited widely through the Great Lakes region. His work was shown at The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Butler Institute of American Art, Milwaukee Art Institute, Carnegie Institute, and regularly at the Hoosier Salon Annuals and the Indiana State Fair. Brucker was awarded top honors in Hoosier Salon exhibitions on three different occasions. The melancholy 1944 painting of a working class boy with a sled, which the artist entitled "Bag Ears", won a first prize award in the portrait division of the Indiana State Fair Art Exhibition the year it was submitted. 

As a portraitist, Edmund Brucker seemed a natural choice as artist for the official portrait of Matthew E. Welsh, Governor of Indiana from 1961 to 1965. Brucker had already painted a picture of the new governor in 1960 for the cover of "Indiana Business and Industry Magazine". The popularity of this portrait resulted in an official commission for Brucker in 1964, the last year of Welsh's term. The sittings were given by Welsh in the artist's studio at the Herron School of Art. Brucker was impressed by Welsh's co-operative manner in posing, and the governor was delighted by the result.

Edmund Brucker died in Indianapolis in 1999. His work is represented in the collections of Indiana University, DePauw University, Purdue University, and Dartmouth College.

Source: Askart

Works by Edmund Brucker