Bolton Coit Brown

Chinese Fishing Vessel, Monterey Bay, California, 1890-1900

oil on canvas

22x 27 in.

Gift of Evans Woolen, Stoughton Fletcher, Mrs. Edward Daniels, Mrs. E. F. Hodges and Dr. Mary Spink

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Bolton Coit Brown was the founder of the art department at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California and a founder of the Woodstock Art Colony in New York.  Brown received his painting degrees from Syracuse University in New York.  For more than a decade he served a Professor of Art at Stanford University in California, where he became chairman of the university’s department of drawing and painting.  He resigned after being chastised for using nude models in his advanced life-drawing class.  Brown took up mountain climbing, making maps and drawings of California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains.  He climbed and named Mount Ericsson and was the first to climb, and name, Mount Stanford.  Mount Bolton Brown was named after him in 1922 and Lucy Pass was named after his mountain-climbing wife. Throughout these daring exploits, Brown continued to paint.

During his tenure at Stanford University, Brown painted this view of Monterey Bay.  While he never travelled abroad, Brown’s art certainly came under the influence of French impressionism, which he probably absorbed from his many artist friends who espoused the impressionist aesthetic. Chinese Fishing Village makes use of the broken light and color of the impressionists, yet it remains a painting of subtly modulated hues that achieve a quiet, contemplative mood.  In this sense, the landscape is close to those of Brown’s contemporaries, Henry Ward Ranger, Chauncey Foster Ryder and Dwight Tryon, whose interest were in atmosphere and tone rather than the bright colors of the impressionists.

Reference

Clinton Adams. Crayonstone: The Life and Work of Bolton Brown, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993. ISBN-13: 978-0826313881