Benjamin Chambers Brown

(1865-1942)

The Joyous Garden 30 1/2 x 40 1/2in framed 40 x 50in

Footnotes

Provenance
Robert Simpson, Los Angeles, California.
Thence to the present owner.

Exhibited
Laguna Beach, Laguna Art Museum, Early Artists in Laguna Beach: The Impressionists, September 23 - November 5, 1986.
Scottsdale, Fleischer Museum, Selections from the Irvine Museum Exhibition, March 1 - May 31, 1993.
Oakland, The Oakland Museum, Selections from the Irvine Museum Exhibition, November 13, 1993 – February 20, 1994.
Irvine, The Irvine Museum, California Impressionists: A presentation of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games, organized by the Georgia Museum of Art and The Irvine Museum, [six city traveling exhibition], July 1996 – January 1998.
Irvine, The Irvine Museum, Masters of Light, Plein-Air Painting in California 1890-1930, [four city traveling exhibition], September 2002 – January 2004.
Irvine, The Irvine Museum, All Things Bright & Beautiful, Paintings from The Irvine Museum, [traveling exhibition], 2008-2009.
Irvine, The Irvine Museum, All Things Bright & Beautiful, The National Tour Comes Home, November 10, 2010 – June 11, 2011.
Irvine, The Irvine Museum, California Impressionism, [traveling exhibition], 2012-2015.
Irvine, The Irvine Museum, Then & Now: 100 Years of Plein Air Painting, May 17 – October 2, 2014.
Irvine, The Irvine Museum Collection at the University of California, Harmony of Light: Spring in California, February 22 – June 21, 2018.

Literature
S. Landauer, D. Keyes and J. Stern, California Impressionism, Irvine,
The Irvine Museum, 1996, pp. 30, 87, no. 7, illustrated.
J. Stern, Selections from the Irvine Museum, Irvine, 1992, p. 37, illustrated.
J. Stern, Reflections of California, The Athalie Richardson Irvine Clarke Memorial Exhibition, Irvine, 1994, p. 106, illustrated.
W.H. Gerdts, All Things Bright & Beautiful, California Paintings from The Irvine Museum, Irvine, 1998, p. 53, illustrated.
J.I. Smith, A California Woman's Story, Irvine, 2006, p. 92, illustrated.
J. Stern, Masters of Light, Plein Air Painting in California 1890-1930, Irvine, 2002, pp. 84-85, illustrated.
J. Stern, Selections from the Irvine Museum, Irvine, 2009 (reprise of the 1992 exhibition of the same name), pp. 82-83, illustrated.

After training at the Académie Julian in Paris, Benjamin Chambers Brown moved west to Pasadena via St. Louis in 1896. He turned his attention from still life and portrait painting to capturing local landscapes. He became especially known for his scenes of poppy fields. Brown's enthusiasm for painting local scenery en plein air won him the respect of his peers. Art critics of the day dubbed him the "Dean of Pasadena Painters" and the "Patriarch of Pasadena." In the 1916 book Art in California, the first art editor for the Los Angeles Times, Antony Anderson, wrote an essay titled "Six Landscape Painters of Southern California," in which he described the inspired paintings of Benjamin Brown: "Benjamin Chambers Brown, a prize pupil from St. Louis, was coached in all the [academic] traditions, but his twenty years in Pasadena have induced him to drop all hampering impediments of prejudice, and cling only to the things he found good...You can't live for twenty summers on the hem of the Sierra Madre's [San Gabriel Mountains] magnificent purple garment and still keep up your Parisian ideals of seeing and doing. You're bound to start new fashions of your own that are absolutely in keeping with your environment. For here is nature at its biggest and best, bigger and better than all the ateliers put together, and more needful to art."¹ The Joyous Garden exemplifies this embrace of the new Southern California style as it blossoms and grows, influenced by the early Impressionists but translated into a new fresh explosion of color and style.

¹ E. Adams, "How the San Gabriel Valley Inspired California
Impressionism and Lured Artists from Across the Nation: Part II of III", California Art Club Newsletter, Winter 2017, p. 4.