John George Brown was the most celebrated painter of genre scenes in America in the late nineteenth century. His realistic depictions of children and of outdoor life were widely known and extremely popular, especially his portrayals of the street urchins of New York City.
Brown was born in Bensham, England, a tiny town no longer in existence that was absorbed by Newcastle-on-Tyne in the city of Durham. His father was a working class attorney’s clerk. At age fourteen he became an apprentice in the glass-cutting trade, while spending evenings studying art at the government school of design at Newcastle under William Bell Scott, a poet, painter, and friend of the Pre-Raphaelites. Brown pursued his artistic career in Edinburgh at the Drawing Academy where he attended painting classes with Robert Scott Lauder.
The artist moved to the United States in 1853 and settled in Brooklyn two years later. He set up a studio there and was briefly employed by the Brooklyn Flint Glass Company. At the same time, he continued his studies with the miniature painter Thomas Seir Cummings, and in 1860 he moved to a studio in the illustrious Tenth Street Studio Building, remaining there throughout his career. Brown began to exhibit at the National Academy of Design in New York in 1858 and became an academician in 1863. He served as vice-president of the Academy from 1899 until 1903 and was also active in the American Watercolor Society.
His paintings of the 1860s, tightly rendered, detailed depictions of anecdotal subjects, show the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites. Brown's style and preference for narrative scenes of country and city life also derived from the tradition of English and Scottish genre painters such as Augustus Mulready and Sir David Wilkie. In his genre portrayals, however he sought to express "contemporaneous truth, which will be of interest to posterity," and by the 1880s he had turned to the rendering of a new subject, the young newspaper sellers and bootblacks whose presence in the American urban arena had become pronounced.
Although he sought to render modern life, Brown painted his subjects in his studio, posing them singly or in groups for carefully arranged compositions. He stressed only the pleasant aspects of street urchin existence, and his clean well-scrubbed subjects show none of the hardships or uncertainties of their lives. Collected by wealthy patrons and reproduced extensively, Brown's portrayals of street gamins summed up a new feeling of optimism about urban life. In 1906 the American Art News wrote, "No painter has ever been as happy in the delineation of the street boys of American cities. He is a master of composition and grouping, and the rendering of expression and character."
Throughout his career, Brown spent his summers in the rural areas of New York and Vermont, where he painted local farmers and their families. He also portrayed fishermen at Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick, Canada.
Brown's paintings are in numerous important private and public collections including the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York;
The Corcoran Art Gallery, Washington, D. C.; the
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the
National Museum of American Art, Washington, D. C.; the
Peabody Institute, Baltimore; and many others.
LNP
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