Description
Signature: Unsigned
Medium/Ground: Oil / Canvas
Size Inches: 22″ x 34″
The oil is one of his largest landscapes known. It was just exhibited in the Quest royal Gallery exhibition 3 years ago
as “Sunset on a Lake” circa 1860’s. This is one of his finest, and most vivid images he has painted.
William Mason Brown was among a very elite group of artists equally adept at landscape painting as well as still-life painting.
We have a beautiful still life of peaches out in the wild, done later in his career as well. He was born in upstate New York in 1828, in the city of Troy, soon he began to paint landscapes, inspired by Thomas Cole and the romantic artists of the Hudson River School.
As the period of his landscape production largely covers the years of 1850 to 1869 his style of painting most resembles that of the Pre-Raphaelites. His technique was precise and with an extraordinary attention to detail. That is not surprising, especially when one learns that Brown lived in Brooklyn, home to most of the Pre-Raphaelites, and painted microscopic detail with equal fervor. It is not known how involved he was in the Society of Truth in Art, but he is extensively included in Linda Ferber’s 1985 landmark book on the group, “The New Path, the American Pre-Raphaelites”.
Ironically enough, just as the Pre-Raphaelites burned out prematurely from the exacting nature of their work, so too did William Mason Brown’s landscape phase come to an early end, as he switched over to still-life painting. After 1869 he primarily switched over to painting fruit and floral still-lives.
His work found its way into numerous public collections which include the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Art, Philadelphia, PA; the J.B. Speed Museum, Louisville, KY; the Haggin Museum, Stockton, CA; the Munson Williams Proctor Institute, Utica, NY; the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum, St. Johnsbury, Vermont; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio; the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, and the Peabody Institute, Baltimore, MD.
This painting we have now, “Sunset Autumn on the Lake”, while undated, likely dates to about 1865, the tail end of his early period when tightly executed landscapes were his specialty. The highly vivid colors and crisply painted trees are typical of the this period. Just the way sunset images proliferated just before and during the Civil War, when they symbolized the end of an era.
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