HARRISON BIRD BROWN 1831-1915
Grand Manan Island
Oil on canvas, 13 X 23" (33.02 x 58.42 cm.)
Signed, lower left
Gift of Joseph G. Butler, III, 967-0-126

Variously recorded as Henry B., Harry B., or Harrison Box Brown, Harrison Bird Brown was born in Portland, Maine and apprenticed at age fifteen to Forbes and Wilson, house and ship painters. By 1852, he was active as H. B. Brown, Banner & Ornamental. Painter. He vigorously pursued landscape painting in the 1850s and became a professional easel painter, exhibiting marine subjects at the National Academy of Design in New York in 1858, 1859, and 1860, as well as at the Boston Athenaeum and later at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876.2 By 1860, he was praised as a leading American marine painter.
With Benjamin Champney and John Casilear, Brown painted in the White Mountains where his name can be found in the guest registers of boarding houses frequented by artists. For over thirty years Brown actively painted the Maine coast, especially the Casco Bay area and Grand Manan, a popular summer island off the coast of New Brunswick,
Canada. When he moved to London in the 1890s, he was the best known native Maine painter of his time. He gained fame for himself and the state of Maine with a large canvas in the Maine pavilion of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. He spent the last twenty-three years of his life in England.
The Butler Institute painting is quite possibly the spectacular Headlands of Grand Manan Island which Brown painted a number of times. The light impasto used to depict the large foreground rocks with their creamy highlights sets them sharply off from the thinly painted distant cliffs. Water and whitecaps are adroitly captured, and the surf breaking at the lower left, as if against the picture frame, is a clever touch.
Grand Manan Island is undated, as is much of Brown's work. Judging from a few dated paintings, this picture might be placed in the late 1870s or 1880s.

WILLIAM S. TALBOT