Springtime in the Meadow

Provenance

Cooley Gallery, Old Lyme, Connecticut

Related Works 

Apple Blossoms, 1887, pastel over graphite on buff board, 18 x 21¹³⁄₁₆ inches, signed lower left: J Appleton Brown; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

A Showery May Morning, 1890s, oil on canvas, 31 x 42 inches, signed lower right: J Appleton Brown; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts

Note

In the early 1880s, Boston artist John Appleton Brown began working extensively in pastel, achieving considerable success with the medium. His pastel landscapes, characterized by atmospheric depth, delicate transparency, and a loose, broader handling of form, became a hallmark of his artistic style. Brown often included clouds in his landscape compositions, favoring not only their forms but also the ways in which he could use them to reflect light and absorb color.[1] American art critic William Howe Downes praised these works, noting that they represented “the easy and unaffected form in which a sincere nature expresses the poetry of the countryside,” and that “there could be no purer, more elegant form for that purpose.”[2] Brown’s work is held in esteemed collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Addison Gallery of American Art.

[1] Frank T. Robinson, Living New England Artists: Biographical Sketches, Reproductions of Original Drawings and Paintings by Each Artist (Boston: Press of George H. Ellis, 1888), 26.

[2] William Howe Downes, “John Appleton Brown, Landscapist,” The American Magazine of Art 14, no. 8 (August 1923): 439.