William Mason Brown

William Mason Brown was one of the leading American still-life painters of the mid-nineteenth century. His still lifes are among the most meticulous and realistically detailed of the period. He was a practitioner of the “back-to-nature” still-life painting advocated by the English art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900). These paintings often depicted flowers or fruit shown on the ground as if they had fallen there by chance. The natural settings and minute rendering of each leaf and berry spoke of a reverence for nature