(1831–1913)
J. G. Brown was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, near Durham, and was apprenticed to a glass cutter, pursuing his passion for art through night classes. At the age of 21 he took a job at a glass works in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he again studied in the evening at the Trustees Academy with Robert Scott Lauder. In 1853 he moved to London and shortly afterwards to Brooklyn, New York, where he soon found employment at the Brooklyn Flint Glass Company. He married the owner’s daughter in 1855, and probably with the financial assistance of his father-in-law, set himself up as a portrait painter. He continued his education at the Graham Art School in Brooklyn and the National Academy of Design with Thomas Seir Cummings. Brown’s career as a painter of genre subjects was gaining momentum by the time he took a studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building in 1860, which he kept until his death. He lived in New Jersey from 1863 until 1869, when he settled in Manhattan.
Brown exhibited at the National Academy of Design, Brooklyn Art Association, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Boston Art Club, Boston Athenaeum, Mechanics’ Institute, Boston, Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1889, Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, 1901, and at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1907 and 1908. Brown was a founding member of the Brooklyn Art Social, which became the Brooklyn Art Association. He was also a National Academician and a member of the Artists’ Fund Society of New York, Salmagundi Club, Century Association, and the American Watercolor Society. Brown’s works can be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Brooklyn Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.; Cleveland Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the de Young Museum, San Francisco.
