John George Brown (American, 1831-1913)

Captain Stanley with His Two Sons Cleaning their Catch of Cod;
on the beach of Grand Manan Island, Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick

Signed and dated lower right, J. G. Brown. N.A. / 1877.
Oil on canvas              24 ½ x 19 ½ in.
Framed: 31 x 26 in.
In Period gilt cove frame with garland lip and acanthus leaf decorated corners

Provenance:
Estate of Natalie Podell, Hillsborough
Richard York Gallery
To private collection, Bedford, New York

Note:
According to J. G. Brown scholar, Martha J. Hoppin, this painting depicts Captain Stanley with his two sons on the beach on Grand Manan Island.

Exhibition:
National Academy of Design, New York, 1879, no. 74-79A, probably one of six paintings made on the Island of Grand Manan, New Brunswick.

Literature:
W. Sheldon, Hours with Art and Artists, 1882, Garland reprint, 1978, pp. 151-152, detail reproduced in engraving.

Artist:
National Academy of Design artist, John George Brown, was a highly successful genre painter in turn-of-the-century America. His depictions of street urchins, vendors and servants appealed to the taste of the Victorian public, though perhaps sugar coating the realities of life of that time. Best known for these popular subjects, when painting for pleasure, he turned toward country and outdoor scenes and painted rural subjects in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the Hudson River Valley and in this picture off the coast of Canada.

Brown was born in England in 1860. While serving as an apprentice to a glass worker, he took evening drawing classes with an artist associated with the Pre Raphaelites. After further study in Edinburgh and London, he immigrated to America, settling in Brooklyn and working in the Flint Glass Works. His designs so impressed his employer that he helped the young artist study in New York with miniaturist Thomas Cummings whose daughter Brown married. In 1857, he enrolled in the National Academy of Design and became involved in the Brooklyn art community becoming a member of the Brooklyn Art Association. As his career progressed, he took a studio in the prestigious Tenth Street Studio Building in Manhattan in 1860. The artist was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design in 1861 and a full Academician in 1863. He also taught at the Academy where his classes were very popular. Brown served as vice president of the Academy from 1899 to 1903 and as president of the American Watercolor Society from 1887 to 1907.

Subject:
In Hours with Art and Artists (1882), art critic G. W. Sheldon describes J. G. Brown as “a realist of the first water” committed to painting scenes from life in America. He then elaborates this portrayal by relating a story connected to Cleaning Fish, one of several works that Brown executed during his summers at the Island of Grand Manan, New Brunswick, Canada.

“Mr. Brown has made several trips to Grand Manen [sic], and it was on the second of these excursions in the summer of 1878, that he gathered the large number of studies of which the fishermen here engraved (detail Cleaning Fish) is perhaps the strongest. All visitors to that region will remember the local fame of Captain Stanley, of Stanley Beach – ‘Old Stanley,’ as he is affectionately called by the inhabitants – who now, in his sixtieth year, can row longer and faster than any of the lusty young Grand Manen fishermen; can brave, bare-breasted, the coldest storms of winter; can clean more fish in an hour than the most adept and agile of his peers; and can outwalk, outrun, outwork, the most virile of them. It is the old captain himself, and his son, that the artist presents in the capital oil-stud engraved herewith; and when the work was being finished on Stanley Beach, Mr. Brown was surrounded by the admiring faces of almost the entire population of the island, who were profoundly interested in the process by which their old friend was being transferred to canvas – interested all the more because they could not understand one jot nor tittle of it. Not only this study, but several others made at the same time, were so stirringly faithful, so brisk and spirited in treatment, and so happy in selection, that they received very wide recognition, and brought to Mr. Brown more emolument in the way of fame than did the results of any other summer’s work of his, before or since. It was the first time in the history of American Art that the sturdy, honest fisherman of that little island off the coast had been interpreted to his contemporaries and to posterity by the pencil of a painter.” (ibid, pp. 151-152).

Memberships:
National Academy of Design
American Watercolor Society

Museum Collections:
Cleveland Museum of Art
Corcoran Art Gallery, Washington, D.C.
High Museum of Art, Atlanta
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Newark Museum of Art
Terra Museum of Art, Chicago
Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore
Yale University Art Museum, New Have