Bolton Brown

Bolton Coit Brown (November 27, 1864 – September 15, 1936) was an American painter, lithographer, and mountaineer. He was one of the original founders of the Byrdcliffe Colony in Woodstock, New York, part of what is now referred to as the Woodstock Art Colony. 300px

Before Woodstock: Stanford and the Sierras Brown was born and raised in Dresden, in upstate New York. His sister was the scientific illustrator Anna B. Nash. After receiving his master's degree in painting from Syracuse University, he moved to California in 1891 to create the Art Department at Stanford University. Brown headed the department for almost ten years, but was dismissed in a dispute over his use of nude models in the classroom. Students often visited his studio-home for discussions on various environmental and political causes. In 1898 Brown designed the studio rooms in Stanford's new Art Building, which included such "radical" innovations as "one continuous belt of glass" eight feet high and muted terra cotta and gray tones on the walls. The walls were covered with reproductions and original works "by the avant-garde artists of Paris."

Brown was an accomplished mountain climber and benefited from Stanford's proximity to the Sierra Nevada range, mostly famously explored by John Muir (1838–1914), founder of the Sierra Club, of which Brown was a charter member. Brown was the first to record climbing a group of peaks in the Sierras with, in two instances, his intrepid wife Lucy; his most challenging first ascent was of Mount Clarence King (also known as Mount King ) in August 1896. According to the Climber's Guide to the High Sierra, Brown's ascent of Mount King was the first time advanced aid-climbing techniques were used in North America. Nearby Mount Bolton Brown (13,491 ft) is named after him; Brown also named several peaks in the area of Mount King. Along with fellow artistic spirit Hervey White, also hired by Whitehead, Brown developed and managed the grounds of Byrdcliffe from 1902 to 1903, constructing footpaths, plumbing systems and bungalows. Although the initial disputes were over budgets and deadlines, Brown later cited his distrust of the "medieval" intentions Whitehead harbored for the colony. whose premature death in 1925 was both a professional and emotional blow to Brown. In addition to printing these others' work, Brown created over 400 lithographs of his own, with a focus on nature and female nudes; lithographs such as Moonlight Bathers (1915), Cloudy Dawn, (1916) and Sifting Shadows (1916) represent Brown's ability to translate Tonalism from painting into a print medium. He is buried in the Woodstock Artists' Cemetery, on a simple birch pallet covered with pine branches under a boulder of his selection.