Bradford was enrolled as a student in engineering at the University of Wisconsin when at the outbreak of World War I he droppped out to enlist in the army. It was while receiving treatment in a Des Moines, Iowa, army hospital that he decided to become an artist. He first took a course in at the Cumming School of Art in Des Moines; in 1920 he moved to New York and entered the National Academy School, where he studied with Charles Hinton and George Maynard. In 1923, having received the Academy's Mooney Travelling Scholarship, and the Prix de Rome, he left for four years of study at the American Academy in Rome.
Bradford taught at the Academy school from 1931 to 1936, at Cooper Union from 1930 to 1932, and at the Yale University School of Fine Arts in 1938, the year he moved to Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut, maintaining a studio in New York.
Bradford was primarily a muralist. His work in this field includes: twenty-six panels in the Milwaukee (Wisconsin) County Court House, 1932; six for Lever Brothers building, Cambridge, Massachusetts; ten for the New York World's Fair, 1939); murals for the Outgamie County Courthouse at Appleton, Wisconsin, 1942; the Fifth Avenue branch of the National City Bank of New York, 1950; an alterpiece for the Resurrection Chapel of Christ Church, Cranbrook, Michigan; a mosaic ceiling and apse in chapel at the United States Military Cemetary, Cambridge, England, 1953; and five mosaic tympana on the theme of charity for the porch of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Washington, D. C.
The Academy awarded Bradford the Samuel F. B. Morse medal in 1960 for his marble mosaic tympana at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D. C.
