Benjamin Brown

Benjamin Chambers Brown (July 14, 1865 – January 19, 1942) was a well-known California Impressionist landscape artist. His most notable mediums were oil, lithography and etching.

Early life and education Benjamin Chambers Brown was an artist born in Marion, Arkansas Brown was trained as a photographer instead. He studied at the University of Tennessee, and later at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts under Paul E. Harney and John Hemming Fry in 1884. He studied in Paris at the Académie Julian under Jean-Paul Laurens and Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant in 1890.

Career

During his early career, Brown traveled and worked in St. Louis, Little Rock and Texas. He initially specialized in portraiture and still life. Upon moving to Pasadena in 1896, he began to paint landscapes. His notable works include his impressionist landscapes of Sierra peaks and field poppies.

Awards Brown received many awards, including the bronze medal from the Portland Expo in 1905. He won a bronze medal in etching at the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Diego in 1915, where he never won silver and gold medals as well.

Later life and legacy By 1925, Brown's health was declining. Therefore, the amount of art he could continue to produce declined. In 1929, he had an abscessed tooth and lost a lot of weight because it was too painful to eat. This ailment impeded his painting. Although his health did improve in the 1930s, He served as the president of the California Society of Printmakes until 1929. Brown died of pneumonia on January 19, 1942, in Pasadena.

Brown's works are held by the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, Oakland Museum of California, the Los Angeles, California Municipal Art Collection, the Montclair, New Jersey Museum, the Cleveland, Ohio Museum, the Boise, Idaho Public Library, and other public libraries throughout the country. He is remembered as one of the first artists to paint in Pasadena.