Benjamin Brown was an American painter who created his artworks in the impressionist style. He worked in such fields as oil and sometimes watercolour painting, etching and lithography. As to paintings, his most famous pictures were these of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and fields of poppies.
Background
Benjamin Brown was born on July 14, 1865, in Marion city, Arkansas, United States. He was one of the five children of a judge Benjamin Chambers Brown and his wife Mary Booker Brown.
The parents would like that their son became a lawyer, but he chose the artist’s career.
In his childhood, the main part of which he spent in Little Rock, Arkansas, United States, Benjamin was fascinated by photography.
Education
Benjamin Brown began his artistic training at the University of Tennessee. He graduated from the institution in 1884 and entered the Saint Louis School of Fine Arts in Missouri (later a department of Washington University) the same year. There, he was taught by Paul E. Harney and John Hemming Fry.
Two years later, the young man came back to his native Little Rock because of health problems of his father. The same year, he returned to the Saint Louis School and had studied there for four years.
To pursue his education, Brown and a couple of his friends, William Griffith and Edmund Wuerpel, travelled to Paris and enrolled at the Académie Julian where they studied under the tutelage of Jean-Paul Laurens and Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant.
Career
Benjamin Brown started his career as a founder of his own art school in his native Little Rock at the end of the 1890s, working as a portraitist.
After his father’s death in 1896, the painter relocated to Pasadena, California. He had few commissions for portraits in the city and soon shifted to brightly coloured impressionist landscapes. He became popular due to his paintings of poppies. There, in Pasadena, Brown had his debut solo show organized with the help of John Bentz at the Hotel Green. The painter started to sell his artworks only about 1900.
At this time, Brown exhibited his creations in northern California and regions around San Francisco. In 1904, the artist presented his artworks at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis, at the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland, Oregon the following year and at the Seattle’s Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition five years later. The painter took an active part at the artistic life of the Californian community – in 1906, he founded the Painter’s Club.
Three years later, Brown established the studio at Mill Valley, California and had worked there for one year. The first etchings appeared in 1914, and Brown along with his brother co-founded the Printmakers of Los Angeles, renamed later as California Society of Printmakers.
Among other shows of the 1900s were the solo expositions in 1915, 1917, 1918 and the group exhibition in 1929 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the group show at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915 and at the Oakland Art Gallery in 1929.
By 1925, Benjamin Brown’s artistic activity was restricted because of health problems, however, he had presided California Society of Printmakers till 1929.