oxford gallery

James Brade Sword
American (1839–1915)

James Brade SwordSunset by the Shore, 12" by 20" (image), 19" by 27" (with frame), s.l.l.

James Brade Sword was born in Philadelphia in 1839 but spent much of his youth in Macao, China. He returned to complete secondary school in Philadelphia and became employed as a civil engineer. Sword studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy under Christian Schussele and then with marine artist George Washington Nicholson. Throughout his artistic career, he painted a wide range of subjects, from portraits and genre scenes to landscapes in the Hudson River idiom. He also painted various locales in the Northeast, including eastern Pennsylvania, Newport, Rhode Island, the New Jersey shore, the White Mountains and the Adirondack Mountains. He was elected President of the Philadelphia Society of Artists in 1878 and, in 1887, Director of the Art Club of Philadelphis. Sword was also a member of the Brooklyn Art Association and of the Boston Art Club. He died in Philadelphia in 1915.

Work by James Brade Swork can be found in the collections of the University of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Reading (Pa.) Public Museum, the Farnsworth Art Museum, the Washington County (Md.) Museum of Fine Arts, the Colby College Museum, and the Yale Art Gallery. Sword’s portrait of House Speaker J. W. Jones still hangs in the Capitol in Washington.



Prices available on request