Harrison Bird Brown was born in
1831 in Portland, Maine, and is best known for his White Mountain
landscapes and marine paintings of Maine's Casco Bay. By 1860,
Brown was being praised as a leading American marine painter.
Known also as Harry B., Henry B., and some times mistakenly as
Henry Box Brown (Eason), he began an apprenticeship at age 21
with house and ship painters Forbes and Wilson. He then became
a banner and sign painter, under the name "H. B. Brown, Banner
& Ornamental, Painter".
Landscape painting was popular in the
mid 19th century, thanks in part to the influence of Charles Codman
(1800-1842), whose paintings were collected for their very romantic
sentiments. It is possible that Brown saw examples of Codman's
poetic paintings, and was influenced by his works.
Brown was one of the early artists to
paint the coastline of Maine's Monhegan Island, where he depicted
the headlands as awesome, mystical forces. Humanity versus nature,
and the human relationship to nature, themes prevalent in mid
and late-19th century literature and philosophy, figured frequently
in his seascapes.
He often painted in the White Mountains,
and his name can be found in the guest registers of many places
artists frequented in those mountains. The coast of Maine was
also a favorite painting venue of Brown's for over thirty years.
He depicted the wholesome outdoor environment of the state, with
special fondness for the Casco Bay area and Grand Manan, an island
off the New Brunswick, Canada coast. Brown also produced two widely
distributed illustrations of Crawford Notch for the Maine Central
Railroad in 1890.
He exhibited at the National Academy
of Design in New York from 1858 to 1860, and at the Boston Athenaeum
and Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876. By 1892 he had
become the best known native Maine painter of his time, and gained
fame for himself and the state with a large canvas in the Maine
pavilion of the 1893 World's Colombian Exposition in Chicago.
In 1892 he was elected president of the Portland Society of Art.
That same year, however, he moved to
England to be with his only surviving child, a daughter, and spent
the last twenty-three years of his life there. He died in England
in 1915, and his work has been preserved at the Peabody Museum
in Salem, Massachusetts and at the Portland Museum of Art. Most
of his paintings were completed in New England before he moved
to London, but he continued to paint until his death in 1915.
Harrison Bird Brown's works can be seen
at the Peabody Museum in Salem, Massachusetts and at the Portland
Museum of Art.
