Margaret Fitzhugh Browne

Cover illustration by Browne for The Modern Priscilla: A Magazine Exclusively for Women, September 1909. This work epitomizes Browne's "Old Maid",^[1] Victorian values

Margaret Fitzhugh Browne (7 June 1884, West Roxbury, Massachusetts - 11 January 1972, Boston, Massachusetts ), was a painter of portraits, indoor genre scenes, and still lifes, although portraits dominated her output.

Family

Browne was the second child of Cordelia Brooks Browne and James Maynadier Browne. She had three sisters (Katherine, Brooks and Emily) and a brother Causten. Her older sister, Katherine, was an artist who illustrated, among other items, children’s verse written by her mother’s second husband, David K. Stevens.

Education

Browne studied at the Massachusetts Normal School from 1904 to 1909, where one of her teachers was the popular artist Joseph DeCamp. She attended the Boston Museum School in 1909 and 1910, receiving instruction from Edmund Tarbell and Frank Benson. During this period she also received private instruction from the color theorist Albert Munsell and from Richard Andrew.

Career

Browne’s career included all aspects of the art world. She had a studio in the Fens and one in Annisquam, an attractive part of Gloucester, Massachusetts, where she also taught classes. She began her career as a portrait painter in 1910, was the art editor of the Boston Evening Transcript in 1919-20, and authored a book Portrait Painting in 1933.^[1] In this book she advised portraitists to work quickly to capture their sitter’s features and not exhaust them. She was a firm adherent of realism in art, and was quoted referring to the 1940 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston exhibit of works by Picasso as "an exhibition of crazy stuff".^[2] She also founded the Boston branch of the Society for Sanity in Art and served on the Advisory Board of Josephine Logan's Chicago branch, an organization that promoted the retention of traditional values and styles in art.

From early 1944 through May 1945, Browne served the USO as a Portrait Sketcher, volunteering three times a week, as her diaries now at the Boston Public Library indicate . Photographs of over 120 of these charcoal portraits of servicemen and women were made and presented to her and are archived in the Boston Public Library. Many of the photographs carry the names of the servicemen and women and a few wrote a heartfelt note to her on the back. Similar wartime efforts^[3] have been documented and help understand the support that she and others gave to the war .

Among the subjects of her portraits are: Henry A. Wise Wood, Mrs. Wood, the Wood’s children and grandson; Senator William Borah; Arthur D. Little, whose portrait hung for years in the lobby of his eponymous firm; her brother-in-law, the noted author James Brown; Miss Eleanor Satterlee, granddaughter of John Pierpont Morgan, Sr.; King Alfonso XIII of Spain, whose portrait is in the New York Yacht Club; Ray Curley, the boxer; Charles Kellogg Burdick, one of the first faculty of the Cornell Law School, Dean of the Law School, 1926–36, whose portrait now hangs in the Reading Room of the Law School; Dr. Frederick Taylor Lord and Dr. Reginald Heber Fitz, whose portraits are now in the Massachusetts General Hospital; Helen Osborn Storrow, whose portrait hangs in the Museum of the Girl Scouts in Cedar Hill, Waltham, MA; numerous self-portraits; portraits of family members; and Bobby Jones, commissioned by the City of Atlanta. One of her most powerful paintings, as described in American Women Artists, 1830–1930, is “Wounded in the War” or “Blessé de Guerre.” Here the “hot red backdrop creates a dynamic foil to the sensitivity expressed in the foreground figures,” a man blinded in World War I and his dog he holds on his lap.^[4]

Browne excelled in figure subjects with themes such as "The Chess Player," "The Art Students," “Bridge,” “Little Leaguers,” and portraits of ballet dancers. From A Studio of Her Own,^[5] one reads that Browne injected a great deal of feeling into a simple design, and demonstrated a flair for the human and pictorial qualities in her portraits . She was known to reduce her portrait subjects to the simplest planes, attempting to attain a degree of force without crudeness, as in "The Old Farmer's Almanac." In this picture a country man in shirt sleeves reads by a lamp in the comfort of a kitchen. Her model for the work was a farmer who lived near her summer studio in Annisquam. Nine of her portraits are in the Annisquam Village Hall. As Raymond Agler, Fine Arts Dealer, writes on his web page

Browne's love of the staged scene found perfect expression in her annual "Wax Works", the tableau vivants that she produced every summer for 25 years at the Annisquam Sea Fair (which continues to the present, and was the subject of an article in the "New Yorker"). She had an uncanny talent for identifying facial similarities of the famous or infamous in the looks and manners of her neighbors--who were then recruited to pose as wax figures, the subjects ranging from Marat (with a gob of ketchup on his chest) in his bathtub, to Little Miss Muffet.

In 1927, Browne won a commission to go to Europe to paint the King of Spain for the New York Yacht Club. A yachtswoman herself, Margaret Fitzhugh Browne enjoyed the experience immensely, and the painting of Alfonso XIII is considered one of her finest works. Shortly after the King’s death in 1941, Browne wrote an extensive article about meeting the King and painting his portrait. It was published in the March 2, 1941 edition of the Boston Sunday Globe and in it she called the King lively, humorous, agreeable, and a capital story teller.

Browne was a member of most professional artist's groups of her time including the Guild of Boston Artists, Copley Society of Art, Rockport Art Association, Grand Central Art Galleries in New York and at least a dozen others. Her works were included in the exhibitions of most of these organizations and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago. She was the recipient of many awards. Solo exhibitions of her work were held in Boston in 1915,1917,1926,1938 and 1957; in Duxbury, CT in 1916, in New York City in 1924, in Washington, DC in 1930, at the Boston Art Club in 1936, and at the Newport Art Association in 1950.

Two years after her death at age 87, the Copley Society held a "Memorial Exhibition of Flower Compositions and a Few Portraits by Margaret Fitzhugh Browne." The Copley Society awards the Margaret Fitzhugh Brown Memorial Award for Excellence in Portraiture.

Sources

Erica Hirshler, A Studio of Her Own, Women Artists in Boston, 1870-1940, 2001; American Women Artists, 1830-1930, The National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1987; various newspaper and web accounts, and personal papers in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington and The Boston Public Library.

References

External links

• The Diaries of Margaret Fitzhugh Browne at the Boston Public Library