American Painting and Sculpture

WILLIAM MASON BROWN
(American, 1830-1895)

Peaches
Oil on canvas
Gift of Mrs. Hattie Bishop Speed 1927.28.

William Mason Brown was one of the leading American still-life painters of the mid-nineteenth century. His still lifes are among the most meticulous and realistically detailed of the period. He was a practitioner of the “back-to-nature” still-life painting advocated by the English art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900). These paintings often depicted flowers or fruit shown on the ground as if they had fallen there by chance. The natural settings and minute rendering of each leaf and berry spoke of a reverence for nature.

A native of Troy, New York, Brown began his career as a portrait painter. After moving to Newark, New Jersey, in 1850, he turned briefly to landscape painting before specializing in still-life painting in the 1860s. Brown had a remarkable ability to capture various textures in his paintings, from the soft fuzz on peaches to light reflecting off the translucent skin of raspberries. Many of Brown’s compositions were reproduced as color lithographs, including one by Currier & Ives in 1868, which introduced Brown’s name to a wide and varied audience.