George de Forest Brush

George de Forest Brush created romanticized portrayals of Indians and modern interpretations of the mother and child theme that express the ideals of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century cultural movement known as the American Renaissance, with its conservative principles of restraint, elegance, and timeless decorum. Brush was raised in Danbury, Connecticut, and studied at New York’s prestigious National Academy of Design before moving to Paris in 1873. There he studied with the famed figural painter Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904), from whom he absorbed not only the academic ideals of exacting draftsmanship and anatomical modeling but an interest in carefully researched exotic subjects.

Brush returned to the United States in 1880 and supported himself partly through magazine illustration while beginning to exhibit his paintings. The following year, he departed for the West with his brother: living among the Indians, he gathered material for the numerous paintings of native life that would occupy him until the end of the decade. In New York, Brush taught at the Cooper Union and at the Arts Students League. In 1886, he married a student, sculptor Mary Taylor Whelpley (1866–1949), known as Mittie, who, along with the couple’s many children, would become his most important model. After an extended visit to an isolated Indian settlement in Québec, Canada, the Brushes joined the artists’ colony in Cornish, New Hampshire, to which they returned for several summers until 1899, when they made Dublin, New Hampshire, their home base. Brush and his family moved frequently, however, spending two years in Paris in 1890–1892, visiting England in 1898, and living intermittently in Florence between 1903 and the outbreak of World War I.

Around 1892 Brush abandoned the Indian subjects with which he had established his reputation, and began to focus on his growing family in a series of portraits and figural images; he also painted formal commissioned likenesses. His work increasingly revealed his absorption of the art of the Italian Renaissance—both its classical ideals of repose and universality and its technical emphasis on careful draftsmanship, seamless modeling in paint, and the layering of transparent glazes to create rich, velvety surfaces. While Brush sometimes indulged in painting quaint historical dress for his sitters, he did not simply reproduce his Renaissance sources. Rather, he evoked them in modern images that draw parallels between past and present: evincing both tenderness and gravity, his mother-and-child images portray distinct individuals who yet represent timeless types. Exquisitely finished and often placed in striking hand-carved frames, Brush’s paintings were consistently in demand and won several prestigious prizes, notably a gold medal at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. In his later years, Brush returned to Indian themes and his paintings assumed a new coloristic intensity and a dynamic curvilinearity. A fire in the artist’s New Hampshire studio in 1937 destroyed much of his work, but Brush continued to paint until shortly before his death at age eighty-five.