Essay
Provenance
Private collection
William Mason Brown, a well-known painter of still lifes and landscapes, brought a keen sense of observation to both genres, whether depicting the golden nap on the skin of a peach or the jagged contours of a rocky crag. He was born in Troy, New York, where he studied with Abel Buel Moore and got his start painting portraits. With a move to Newark, New Jersey, in
1850, he shifted to landscapes.[1] Brown’s early landscapes were done in a romantic, painterly mode with loose brushwork, but his style gradually became tightly focused, meticulous, and highly finished. This change occurred in the early 1860s, when the influence of John Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelite painters was at its height,[2] especially in Brooklyn, where the artist moved in 1858. Brown’s interest in this movement and his adherence to its principles are reflected in the painstaking attention to detail in Landscape with Figures. Each leaf and clump of grass is carefully rendered in bright, glowing green. The outlines of the rocks and lake, too, seem to be etched into the canvas with sedulous care.
Three figures—a man and two boys—sit at the water’s edge, talking, fishing, and enjoying a pleasant afternoon. Incorporating pastoral figures into a landscape was a commonly used device, yet even though they are small enough to be dwarfed by the immense boulders surrounding the lake, their appearance is an anomaly in Brown’s landscapes, which seldom show any trace of human activity. Nevertheless, their inclusion in the central foreground is far from subtle and seems intended to pique the viewer’s interest.
Landscape with Figures was probably painted in the early 1860s, after Brown moved to Brooklyn and became interested in Ruskinian art theory but before he switched to painting still lifes rather than landscapes, his third and final change of genres. During this period leading up to the Civil War, commentators foretold the dire future that the inescapable strife afflicting the nation was bound to bring about, often using imagery of storms and other natural calamities. As Julia Ward Howe wrote in 1861 in The Battle Hymn of the Republic, “He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword.” Brown’s preternaturally calm landscape may have seemed far removed from these political concerns, but, in fact, his inclusion of two boys and a man enjoying a scene of pastoral pleasures might have been intended to underscore the scene’s very transience. In a short time, all able-bodied men (and often boys) would be called upon to fight, transforming such quiet dells into bloody battlefields. Instead, Brown’s landscape offers an imaginary moment in American history untouched by the forces of sectionalism and warfare in which the faithful recording of nature’s truths was enough to hold off the oncoming storm.
CRH
William Mason Brown exhibited at the National Academy of Design, Brooklyn Art Association, and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Today, his works may be found at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Cleveland Museum of Art; and Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky.
[1]. Peter Hastings Falk, ed., “William Mason Brown,” Who Was Who in American Art: 400 Years of Artists in America (Madison, Conn.: Soundview Press, 1999), vol. 1, p. 474.
[2]. William H. Gerdts, Painters of the Humble Truth: Masterpieces of American Still Life, 1801–1939 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1981), p. 102.