John Brown (artist)

John Brown (1752 – September 5, 1787) was a Scottish artist.

Biography

John Brown was born ca. 1752, in Edinburgh, Scotland, the son of a watchmaker. He studied in Edinburgh at the Trustees’ Academy.^[1] Ca. 1769 he traveled to Rome, where he became a pupil of Alexander Runciman.

For the next eleven years he lived in Rome. In Italy and Sicily he made sketches of the ruins of ancient buildings for his Scottish patrons, William Townley and Sir William Young,^[1] and sent drawings to the Royal Academy.

Brown worked on a small scale and favoured pencil, pen and wash as his media. Notable among his drawings are a number of genre scenes, such as Two Men in Conversation (c. 1775–80; Courtauld Institute, London), which show the influence of Henry Fuseli, with whom Brown was friendly.^[1]

In 1780 Brown returned to Scotland, and over the next several years drew many portraits of dignitaries, including twenty-five portraits of members of the Society of Scottish Antiquaries.

He lived in London in 1786–87, and exhibited miniature portraits. He returned to Scotland in ill health and died at Leith in 1787.

Notes

References

This article incorporates text from the article "BROWN, John" in Bryan's Dictionary of Painters and Engravers by Michael Bryan, edited by Robert Edmund Graves and Sir Walter Armstrong, an 1886–1889 publication now in the public domain.