Benjamin Chambers Brown
(American, 1865-1942)
Pasadena poppy fields (looking up Allan St. from Colorado St.), 1900
oil on lined canvas
signed lower right Benjamin C. Brown, two paper labels from The Pasadena Art Museum to reverse
22 x 30in (53 x 76.5cm)
Provenance:
The Pasadena Art Museum, Pasadena, deaccessioned 1969.

Footnote:
Born in Arkansas in 1865, Benjamin Chambers Brown initially trained as a photographer before transitioning to painting, studying portraiture and still life first at the St. Louis School of Fine Art and then enrolling at the Académie Julian in Paris in 1890.



After his training Brown moved west to Pasadena in 1896. Taken with the splendor of the Southern California countryside, he focused his attention to capturing local landscapes. He became especially known for his scenes of poppy fields. In a close-knit artistic community that counted such notable painters as Elmer and Marion K. Wachtel, Franz A. Bischoff, Alson S. Clark, and Guy Rose, Brown was known as the "Dean of Pasadena Painters" and the "Patriarch of Pasadena."



Renowned as a printmaker as well as a plein air oil painter, Brown was a member of the Pasadena Society of Artists, the California Art Club, the Chicago Society of Etchers, the American Federation of the Arts, and the Laguna Beach Art Association. Brown had solo exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1915, 1917, and 1918. He showed a group exhibition there in 1929. His work also appeared at the Oakland Art Gallery in 1932. Brown‘s work was also part of the painting event in the art competition at the 1932 Summer Olympics.

Frame 30 x 38in. With overall surface soiling, scattered minor cracks, instance of cupping to left center edge, areas of minor pigment loss along bottom edge, yellowing to varnish evident over sky, a three by two inch area of inpainting to lower left quadrant apparent under UV light.