Ethel Isadore Brown

Ethel Isadore Brown (1872–1944) was a painter, illustrator, and schoolteacher from Boston. She is best known for her 1898 painting, Vision de Saint Jean à Patmos.

Ethel Isadore Brown
Born1872
Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Died1944
New Windsor, New York, U.S.
Alma materCowles Art School
OccupationPainter, Schoolteacher

Biography

Brown was born in Boston in 1872, one of three children of Edward P. Brown, a lawyer, and Emma Isadore (Clapp) Brown. Her older sister, Edith Blake Brown, was also an artist who taught at the Cleveland School of Art. Ethel studied at the Cowles Art School in Boston and with Luc-Olivier Merson in Paris. She painted religious scenes, travel scenes, and portraits. In the late 1890s she exhibited at the National Academy of Design, the Society of American Artists, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,[1] and at the Salon du Champs de Mars in Paris.[2] From 1902 to 1906 she taught drawing, painting, and art history at the Saint Agnes School for Girls in Albany, New York. After her sister died suddenly in 1907, Brown moved in with her brother-in-law and his two small children and remained there until he died in 1936. She died at her home in New Windsor, New York, in 1944.[1]

Brown, her sister, and Elisabeth Parsons designed a stained glass window that was displayed in the Woman's Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The feminist-themed piece, titled Massachusetts Mothering the Coming Woman of Liberty, Progress and Light, was sponsored by the Women's Educational and Industrial Union. As of 2012 it was housed in the Smith Museum of Stained Glass Windows in Chicago.[3] The older woman on the right represents Massachusetts, nurturing and encouraging the liberated young woman of the future.[4]

Her best known painting is Vision de Saint Jean à Patmos (1898), which depicts the Revelation of St. John the Divine on the Isle of Patmos. It is remarkable for its inventive use of light and shadow. The painting is included in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and is an example of American Symbolist painting.[5]

Brown was also an accomplished illustrator; her drawings appeared in The Quarterly Illustrator,[6][7] and she illustrated an 1893 edition of William Black's A Princess of Thule.[8]

  • Vision de Saint Jean à Patmos
  • View towards the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, 1900
  • A Princess of Thule, p. 4.
  • A Princess of Thule, p. 118.

References
  1. Corn, Wanda M.; Garfinkle, Charlene G.; Madsen, Annelise K. (2011). Women Building History: Public Art at the 1893 Columbian Exposition. University of California Press. pp. 190–191. ISBN 9780520241114.
  2. "Ethel Isadore Brown". Smithsonian American Art Museum.
  3. Garfinkle, Charlene G. (2012). "Progress Illuminated: Two Stained Glass Windows from the 1893 Woman's Building". Woman's Art Journal. 33 (1): 32–38. JSTOR 24395265.
  4. "Stained Glass from 1893, World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago". Field Museum.
  5. "In This Case: Light Displays". Smithsonian American Art Museum. 2006.
  6. Maxwell, Perriton (1894). "The Illustrations of the Quarter". The Quarterly Illustrator. II (5): 57–68.
  7. Champney, Elizabeth W. (1894). "Woman in Art". The Quarterly Illustrator. II (6): 111–124.
  8. "A Princess of Thule". Scribner's Magazine. 14: 21. 1893.
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