Byron Browne was born in Yonkers, New York on June 26, 1907.

Browne studied at the National Academy of Design from 1924 to 1928 with C.W. Hawthorne and Ivan Olinsky. In 1928, Browne destroyed much of his early work in a rejection of academicism. During the same time, he was introduced to abstract art by Arshile Gorky.

In the 1930’s, Browne worked on the Murals Division of the Works Progress Administration (WPA’s) Federal Art Project. In 1935, he studied with Hans Hofmann and joined the Artists’ Union, and in 1937 was a founding member of American Abstract Artists. Browne’s style was unique, with geometric abstractions tinged by cubist elements providing an instantly recognizable body of work.

When Byron Browne died on December 25, 1961 at the age of 54, he had completed nearly 1,000 works. His work is located in over fifty museum nationwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of American Art, the MFA Boston, and the Whitney Museum.

Pauline Lennard Palmer was born in McHenry, Illinois in 1867. As a young woman, Palmer was schooled in a convent in Milwaukee and later attended the Art Institute in Chicago. Travel to Paris provided study under artists Simon, Collin, and Courtois.

In 1891, she married Dr. Albert Palmer of Chicago, who encouraged her development as an artist. The Palmers maintained a summer home in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Palmer made friends with many of the Portuguese fishermen’s families. Several of them, especially the children, became subjects for her later works. She also studied at this time with Charles Hawthorne. Following Dr. Palmer’s death in 1920, the artist spent much of her time in a private studio in Cape Cod.

Palmer was involved in numerous organizations. She was a member of the Chicago Municipal Art League, Chicago Art Guild, a charter member of the Chicago Women’s Salon, and a director of the Chicago Drama League. In 1918, she was elected the first woman President of the Chicago Society of Artists. She also served as President of The Art Institute Alumni Association in 1927, and as President of the Chicago Association of Painters and Sculptors from 1929 until 1931.

Palmer has also exhibited widely during her lifetime, with the earliest showing in 1898, and later at expositions in Buffalo (1901), St. Louis (1904), and San Francisco (1915). Starting in 1899, she exhibited annually at the Art Institute of Chicago for 27 years, where she became a legend by winning nearly all of the museum’s major awards, purchase prizes, and honorable mention citations.

In 1938, Palmer and her sister, Marie Lennard, traveled on an “artist’s tour” of England and Scandinavian countries. She became ill in Trondheim, Norway and died there on August 15th of pneumonia. Obituaries celebrating her lifetime of artistic achievement called her “Chicago’s Painter Lady”.

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JOHN GEORGE BROWN (1831-1913)

John George Brown’s sentimentalized portrayals of street urchins, reproduced by the thousands, made him the richest and most celebrated genre painter in turn-of-the-century America.

Born in Durham, England in 1831, Brown studied art in England and Scotland before coming to America in 1853. He was a glassblower in Brooklyn, and a student at the National Academy of Design in New York City.

He opened a studio there in 1860, when his painting His First Cigar launched his national reputation. Brown exploited his considerable talent to supply the Victorian taste for his specialty-adept (copyrighted) pictures of young white shoeshiners, vendors and servants.

From the 1860s on, his reputation as “the boot-black Raphael” never flagged. Toward the end of his life, his yearly income averaged $40,000. Originals sold for $500 to $700. Royalties from just one lithograph, distributed with packaged tea, totaled $25,000. Though he claimed the successful formula of “contemporary truth” for his pictures, none gave doting collectors or wealthy patrons cause for social alarm. He falsified his subjects, who were in reality minority immigrants whose lives were often wretched struggles for survival.

Brown’s street juveniles are invariably cheerful, spunky tykes-never sick, sad, emaciated, hungry or noticeably foreign. Their ragged clothing is picturesque, their grime cosmetic. They are undeniably appealing. Even the most uneven of Brown’s popularized works show painterly skill and sound training. Brown realized he was pressured by his buying public into subjects and techniques below his true ability; the pictures he painted for pleasure, using his full range of artistry, are straightforward and distinguished. Most are of country scenes and outdoor pastimes, with none of the contrived look of his commercialized “trademark” paintings.

Brown’s View of the Palisades (1867, private collection) is a delightful and unaccustomed departure from his genre work. Showing boats on a calm, open bend of the Hudson, it is broadly painted, expansive in feeling, with crisp detail and care in every brushstroke. Brown died in 1913 in New York City.

MEMBERSHIPS National Academy of Design American Water Color Society

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS Corcoran Art Gallery, Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Peabody institute of the City of Baltimore G.W.V. Smith Art Gallery, Springfield, Massachusetts

Francois Gall, (1912-1987)
Francois Gall, Hungarian by birth, became a naturalized French citizen in 1942. He is best known as an impressionist painter in the pure French tradition. He began his artistic studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Rome and was awarded a scholarship in 1930 from the Hungarian government. Six years later: Francois Gall established himself in Paris and became a student of Devambez at the National Academy of Fine Arts. The artist greatly admired the first generation of Impressionists and adopted their concepts for his own interpretations. Parisian scenes and portrayals of women engaged in typically feminine activities were among his preferred subjects, but his repertoire also included landscapes and still-life composition that were the trademarks of his works. The artist participated in various Salon exhibitions in Paris and became a favorite with the public. In 1963, he was honored with the Francis Smith Prize. He died in 1987.

Reference: E. Benezit, Dictionnaire des Peintres

Louis Aston Knight 1873-1948 Louis Aston Knight was the son of internationally famed American artist Daniel Ridgeway Knight. He was born in Paris on August 3, 1873, and died in New York City, May 8,1948. Starting in 1892, Aston Knight attended Academie Julian for several years, where he studied classical figure painting under Jules Lefebvre and Tony Robert-Fleury. Early on he and his Father realized that there should be a basic distinction between their respective artwork. They reached an informal understanding: Ridgeway Knight always introduced one or more figures in his landscapes, whereas Aston Knight never placed figures in his scenes. Aston Knight was a regular exhibitor at the Paris Salons and was a member of the French and American Art Society. He also was a member of the Rochester Art Club in Rochester New York.

Public Collections:

Toledo Luxembourg/Paris Rochester Memorial Art Gallery Museum in Newark, N.J

Awards: Bronze Medal, Paris Salon 1900 Honorable Mention, Paris Salon 1901 Gold Medal, Rheims Exposition 1903 Gold Medal, Nantes Exposition 1904 Gold Medal, Lyons Exposition 1904 Gold Medal, Geneva Exposition 1904 Third Class Medal, Paris salon 1905 Gold Medal, American Art Society 1907 Knighted into the Legion of Honor, 1920

Listed: E. Benezit American Art Journal Mantle Fielding Who’s Who in American Art Young Thieme Becker

William Bradford (1823-1892)

William Bradford, a marine painter of the nineteenth century, was celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic for his arctic scenes. In several trips to Labrador, including exploratory polar expeditions, Bradford photographed and made original studies of this frozen world.
He saw remarkable colors in icebergs-blue, green, purple and gray, shot through with saffron. He painted sailing vessels fishing in the icy waters. He is also known for his remarkably accurate representations of coastal scenes in New England, Nova Scotia and Labrador.
On at least one occasion, Bradford was stranded for two weeks on an ice-locked ship, surrounded by a field of frozen water for 500 miles in all directions. Wearing a sealskin coat, he spent the time drawing and photographing icebergs.

Born a Quaker in Fairhaven, Massachusetts in 1823, Bradford liked art from an early age, but was educated more practically in business. Fight years after his start in commerce, he was bankrupt-a fortunate circumstance for the young artist-to-be, because he permanently turned his back on business and took up painting as a career. Since he lived in a seaport town, ships were available subjects. Bradford painted many of them, selling the portraits for a good income.
Bradford was primarily self-taught, but he also trained with Albert Van Beest; they shared a studio and collaborated on some paintings. Van Beest, however, had a more passionate style than Bradford, who could spend days painting a single group of rocks, making sure that they were faithfully drawn and colored. After two years, the duo separated.

Bradford extended his studies of ships to views of shore and sea, visiting picturesque regions along the North Atlantic coastline. So accurate are his representations that anyone familiar with it can immediately identify the scene of a Bradford painting.

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Art Institute of Chicago
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Elizabeth Jane Gardner Bouguereau (1837-1922)

One of the first American women artists who dared to invade the all male establishment of the French art academies. According to her obituary in the New York Times, she “literally opened Paris ateliers to the women of the world.” She also became the first American woman to exhibit, and later to win a medal, at the Paris Salon.

Born in Exeter, New Hampshire, Gardner graduated in 1856 from Lasell Seminary in Auburndale, Mass. There she received the proper young lady’s training-drawing from outline cards and dabbling in watercolors. At Lasell she became friends with her teacher Imogene Robinson, a bold spirit who went off to study in Dusseldorf and seems to have had a strong influence on her pupil. While coping old masters in Boston, trying to supplement her “polite” art education, Gardner became convinced that her drawing was inadequate and that she, too, needed thorough European training. In 1864 she sailed for Paris with Robinson.

Gardner became an accomplished painter, the first American woman to exhibit in the Paris Salon, in 1866, and the first to win a gold medal (from her painting, Impudence in 1877). Her studio on the Rue Notre Dame des Champs became a mecca for visiting Americans traveling abroad.

She clearly adopted the style and technique of her mentor and husband, William Adolpe Bouguereau. In an oft-quoted remark, she frankly revealed, “I would rather be known as the best imitator of Bouguereau than be nobody.” Certainly, her technical skill and draftsmanship are notable.

Elizabeth Gardner Bouguereau was a woman who knew she wanted success in the main arena of the male art establishment of her day, and went after it with unwavering force of character. After her husbands death in 1905, she once again produced four major paintings a year until she was hampered by rheumatism.

Exhibited:
Paris Salon, from 1872 (first woman to win gold medal)
Exposition Universelle, Paris 1889 (bronze medal)
Philadelphia Centennial, 1876 (awards)
Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893

Listed:
E. Benezit
Thieme/Becker
Clement, 138
Mantle/Fielding

Alfred Thompson Bricher, (1837- 1908)

One of the last of the Luminist painters, Alfred Thompson Bricher was known principally for oil and watercolor paintings of the coast of New England. He brought to a close the cult of nature painting that was started by Thomas Cole and was carried on by such men as Martin Johnson Heade, Frederic Edwin Church and William Haseltine. Many of his sweeping panoramas of the coastline, although well done, suffered from a sameness of format in the opinion of some critics.
  
Bricher was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire in 1837. As a teenager he went to Boston to find a job in business and spent his spare time painting at the Lowell Institute. In 1858, he began painting full-time. For the next 10 years, he worked in Boston and Newburyport, north of Boston.
  
In 1871, he moved to New York and settled on Staten Island. Every summer, however, he went North to sketch and paint on Grand Manan Island and on the shores of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. His particular strength was his ability to capture the translucent appearance of the sea and the crispness of the horizon under a luminous sky.
  
While Bricher displayed a sure linear touch in his oil paintings, there was a greater freedom in his watercolors. His subject matter in the watercolor was more varied, too. Some of his female figures in the medium bear comparison to those that Winslow Homer was painting in the 1870s.

Bricher died in New Dorp on Staten Island in 1908. In the years that followed, his work was largely forgotten. The 1980s had rediscovered him, and now he is looked upon as one of the better marine painters of his time.

Public Collections
Indianapolis Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City