George A. Bradshaw Biography

Born in Trenton in 1880, George Amit Bradshaw was the son of an immigrant English potter from Stoke-on-Trent. He was educated in city schools and exhibited a talent for drawing at a young age. However, the job he found after graduation from Trenton High School was with the Railway Mail Service. In his spare time, he later told a reporter, he used his railroad pass to travel to art museums in New York, Philadelphia and Washington.

Eventually, he studied at the School of Industrial Arts, which had moved into its own West State Street building in 1911. Started as a night drawing class for factory workers, it had been established in 1890 as an extension of the public schools and taught on the third floor of a North Broad Street building. Two moves later, it was renamed the School of Industrial Arts in 1903, with a trustee board appointed by the governor. By 1906, the school had eight teachers and 75 students.

George Bradshaw was interested in painting, but his teacher, Henry McBride, told him: “Your natural medium is line.” In later years, he recalled that his teachers constantly urged him on. He worked on graphics for four years before producing the first etching he was willing to show, of the Water Power. The etching so impressed the faculty that he was hired as an instructor at the school in 1921.

Shortly thereafter, an application for membership in the Brooklyn Society of Etchers (now the Society of American Graphic Artists) was mailed to the school. It was given to Bradshaw, who forwarded “The Water Power” to a jury in Brooklyn. The etching which had made him a teacher won him membership.

He taught pen-and-ink drawing, a class on etching, and a Saturday morning drawing class for children. Retired engineer Raymond Michael, interviewed some 60 years after he’d been a Bradshaw pupil at 13, recalled:

“Every week, he would introduce a new picture. He used one of his own etchings or pen-and-ink drawings. First, he would draw a picture on the blackboard with white chalk. He would show us how to draw trees, clouds, stones, or the walls of a castle. He loved castles and he liked brick work.”

“Next, he would show us how to do shading, how to show water in dark and light. He was just showing us how he did it, and other artists did it. After he gave that part of the lesson, he would circulate the drawings around the classroom, but he always encouraged the students to develop their own style.”

In addition to his many scenes of Trenton, he produced etchings of 20 eastern colleges (including a Princeton University series of 20); scenes from Gloucester, Massachusetts and coastal Maine, where he summered; and a group of English scenes, sketched on a 1952 trip abroad, as well as snow scenes and shore scenes, images of farms and waterways. He did the illustrations for A Pictorial History of New Brunswick and A Pictorial History of Agriculture in New Jersey; the pen and ink illustrations for the 1929 History of Trenton; and even a comic book history of Trenton, serialized in the Trenton Times during the 1929 celebration of the city’s sesquicentennial; as well as a 1929 Newark series, for the Journal of Industry and Finance.

He used photographs from the 1880s and the 1890s as the basis for his “Railroad Series,” depicting four Trenton stations and trains of the past, but the rest of his Trenton works were sketched from life.

He’d go out to sketch a view or a building in pencil or pen and ink, often while sitting in his car in the rain or cold. He told interviewers that he and the police worked out how close to an intersection he could park and when ~ often very early Sunday mornings or very late at night while sketching at busy places, like State and Warren, or State and Broad.

Bradshaw’s interest in architecture has preserved many views of buildings no longer standing. “The city Planning Board should hire me,” he once observed. “It seems that nearly every time I make an etching of an old landmark, it’s only a matter of weeks or months before the demolition contractors come in and tear it down.”

In March, 1936, as the old Trinity Church on Academy Street was being demolished, a Bradshaw etching of its interior went on sale. The picture was a commission of Mrs. Ferdinand W. Roebling, Jr., president of the Guild of Cathedral Builders. Knowing that the old church, which had briefly acted as the cathedral, would be demolished, she had realized its fund-raising potential for the new cathedral under construction on West State Street. It’s a rare Bradshaw interior.

Ben Whitmire, retired director of the Trenton City Museum at Ellarslie, interviewed prior to a small 1994 exhibit of Bradshaw’s Trenton etchings, offered this appreciation:

“It’s remarkable he could be so correct, so complete, so highly skilled in his craft. Yet, he completely misses being mechanical. Even in his most cooly executed etchings, there is a kind of warmth and humanity that is present.”