John George Brown

One of America’s most popular genre painters, John George Brown had a particular affinity for depicting children and centered his long and successful career on urban and rural American youth. He was especially well known for his paintings of the young boys who sold newspapers and shined shoes on the streets of New York, in which he effectively captured their mixture of sprightly innocence and preternatural shrewdness. Adhering to the tenets of the pre-Raphaelite movement, Brown approached painting with an exacting fidelity to nature.