Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Alfred Bricher devoted most of his career to marine painting along the eastern seaboard. He was considered one of the last of the luminist artists, and did paintings, often in watercolor, that convey reflective and atmospheric effects of light on water and air at different times of the day and under varying weather conditions. As a watercolorist, he also depicted good-looking female figures.

Bricher grew up in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and largely self taught, he studied in his leisure hours at the Lowell Institute in Boston and also attended an academy in Newburyport, Massaschusetts.

He began painting landscapes in 1856, and in the 1860s, Bricher followed his contemporaries to paint the popular vistas of the White Mountains in New Hampshire. There, particularly at North Conway, he studied and painted with Albert Bierstadt, William Morris Hunt, Gabriella Eddy, and Benjamin Champney.

In Boston, where he had a studio from 1858 to 1868, he was also exposed to the artistic community of many important nineteenth-century marine and landscape painters including Fitz Hugh Lane and Martin Johnson Heade. He was also highly prolific, an example being that he created twenty finished paintings between 1860 and 1861.

Attesting to his popularity as an artist, as well as the popularity of his subject matter, are numerous chromolithographs made after his work. He completed a number of lithographs of the four seasons for the chromo lithographer, Louis Prang & Company.

In 1868, he moved from Boston to New York, and from 1890, lived on Staten Island in New York Harbor. However, most of his subject matter came from sketching trips on Massachusetts, Maine and Jersey coasts and in Rhode Island and New Hampshire. He also painted numerous scenes of Grand Manan Island in the Bay of Fundy.

In 1874, he became a member of the American Society of Painters in Watercolors. He was elected an associate of the National Academy of Design in 1879, and from 1874 to 1894, he exhibited his paintings at the Boston Art Club.