"Clearing Fog California" by Charles Francis Browne (Am.,1859-1920)

Clearing Fog

Signed and dated: 1915

Ptg: 20"x 28"
New Frame: 28"x 34"

Born in Natick, Massachusetts, Charles Francis Browne was primarily active in Illinois as a landscape painter and teacher, and was one of the original members of the Eagle's Nest Art Colony in Oregon, Illinois. He was married to the sister of sculptor Lorado Taft.

Browne played an active role in California in 1915 when he was the superintendent of the United States section of the Panama Pacific Exposition where he won an award for painting.

He had traveled West previous to that time when, in the summer of 1895, he and sculptor Hermon Atkins MacNeil and writer Hamlin Garland took a tour of Indian reservation in Arizona and New Mexico.

Their stops included the Navajo Reservation, the Hopis at Walpi and Zuni villages, and this trip provided Browne with much material for subsequent paintings.

In 1910, Browne was Assistant Art Commissioner in South America to Buenos Aires and Santiago.

He received his art training at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston from 1882-84 and from Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In Paris, from 1887-90, he studied with Jean Leon Gerome at the Academie Julian.

He became an instructor at the Art Institute of Chicago and shared a studio with George Schreiber. He was founder and editor of "Brush and Pencil" Club, president of the Chicago Society of Artists, and a member and director of the Western Society of Artists. At the Eagle's Nest Art Colony in Oregon, Illinois in the summer of 1919, he was stricken with paralysis. He died the following March at his mother's home in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Sources:

Doris Dawdy, Artists of the American West
Peter Falk, Who Was Who in American Art
Eda Hughes, Artists in California, 1786-1940