JOHN GEORGE BROWN 1831-1913
Perfectly Happy, 1885
Watercolor on paper, 20 x 13" (50.80 X 33.02 cm.)
Signed, lower left
Museum purchase, 967-W-118

n Perfectly Happy, John George Brown depicted his favorite subject, the city shoeshine boy, clearly recognizable by his blacking box and brushes. By 1885 Brown had established himself as a leading genre artist working in a polished realist style. He first painted the bootblack in the 1860s, but did not focus on this subject until later in his career. Between 1880 and 1910 he produced hundreds of works showing bootblacks alone or in groups, sometimes working but most often passing the time between customers. While some of his contemporaries occasionally painted these same children of the streets, Brown defined the type for his age.
From the 1850s on, New York City's streets teemed with roving children who sold flowers, fruit, or newspapers, swept crossings, or blacked boots. Most came from poor immigrant families living in wretched lower Manhattan tenements. They worked because their families desperately needed the money, or because they themselves lived on the streets, barely surviving. Brown could depict these children as "perfectly happy" largely because most people believed that personal failings, not economic forces, caused poverty. Brown's audience wanted to see his bootblacks as independent, resourceful young entrepreneurs. His partially-but not wholly idealized vision reassured a middle class, fearful that street children symbolized a decaying society.
The smiling boy in Perfectly Happy jauntily sticks his thumbs in his suspenders, enjoying the freedom of his unstructured, unsupervised existence. Brown usually presented his street children as self-reliant and engaging, and although wearing worn clothing and not always smiling, they appear remarkably healthy. Browns boys resemble the literary creations of Horatio Alger, whose popular stories about the rise to respectability of hard-working street children began appearing in the late 1860s.
Brown recruited and paid actual street children to model, often using the same child for a number of paintings. The model for Perfectly Happy was Paddy Ryan, based on his resemblance to the boy in Paddy's Valentine (1885, location unknown), who holds an envelope addressed to "Paddy Ryan, 512 W 38th St., N.Y.C." Brown later recalled "I cannot conclude ... without reference to one of the urchins who did much to promote my interest in the youngsters of the street. He called himself Paddy Ryan.... He was with me for a long time, posing for many pictures. His chief delight was to get to the studio ahead of me ... and arrange my palette.... One Thanksgiving I remember sending to his folks a fine big turkey, for they were very poor." Paddy posed for at least six other known bootblack paintings by Brown. A contemporary photograph showing Paddy on the model's stand underscores how young, or at least small, he was. Many of Browns street boys were young, a reflection of fact but also a device to allay fears and gain sympathy for the children. Perfectly Happy also typifies Brown's work in that, like Paddy, many of Brown's subjects lived with their' families, not on the streets, and many were Irish, a fact often indicated through names on blacking boxes or similar devices. Although Brown often varied his single figure compositions by adding the bootblack's dog, he usually employed, as here, a shallow stage with a plain wall and city sidewalk for setting.
Today Brown is not known as a watercolorist, but in his time he was very active and widely recognized in this medium. Frequently he made watercolor replicas of his oils. Perfectly Happy is nearly identical to a lost oil painting called I'm Perfectly Happy The differences between the works, however, suggest that the watercolor is not a replica, but another version of the same pose executed before or after the oil painting. The oil has more detail; Paddy's socks are striped, his boots clearly laced, and Paddy looks directly at the spectator. In the watercolor, by contrast, Brown achieved greater breadth and freshness with his brushwork, and Paddys side-long glance lends the piece a more subtle and natural expression. Painted at the height of his bootblack years, Perfectly Happy is one of Brown's finest works in the watercolor medium.

MARTHA J. HOPPIN