Grafton tyler brown biography
- Grafton Tyler Brown was born on February 22, 1841 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
- Grafton Tyler Brown (February 22, 1841 – March 2, 1918) was an American painter, lithographer and cartographer.
- Grafton Tyler Brown was an American painter, lithographer and cartographer.
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Grafton Tyler Brown
Artist
born Harrisburg, PA 1841-died St. Peter, MN 1918
- Also known as
- Grafton T. Brown
- G. T. Brown
- Grafton Brown
- Born
- Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, United States
- Died
- St. Peter, Minnesota, United States
- Active in
- San Francisco, California, United States
- Portland, Oregon, United States
- Biography
Grafton Tyler Brown, originally from Pennsylvania, had moved to San Francisco by the early 1860s. He ran a lithography business and made images of a "tamed Wild West." Brown increasingly focused on painting after he went on a geological survey in 1882; the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone was a favorite subject between 1886 and 1891. View of the Lower Falls, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone [SAAM, 1994.56] may have been based on sketches he made while traveling, or on commercial photographs available at the time.
Free within Ourselves (exhibition text, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1992)
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GRAFTON TYLER BROWN
American/Canadian 1841-1918
Biography
Grafton Tyler Brown was born on February 22, 1841 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He was an illustrator, painter and lithographer and is known as the first African American artist to depict California and the Pacific Northwest.
Brown’s father was a freedman and was involved in the abolitionist movement. At fourteen years of age, Brown began working as a printer and learning lithography. He moved to San Francisco in 1855 and worked for the Kuchel & Dresel Company which specialized in lithographic views of mining scenes and Californian towns. He also produced most of the pictures for The Illustrated History of San Mateo County.
In 1861, Brown began his own lithography business, G.T. Brown & Co. and it remained active until 1879 when he sold the business. During this time, he created The Illustrated History of San Francisco, which contained seventy-two topographical images of the city. His works often depicted settlements, property sales, claims and city boundaries in the Bay Area and Nevada Ter
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The 1st professional Black artist, working and living in the Pacific North West, British Columbia and California. In addition to his oil paintings. Brown was also a cartographer and lithographer.
The Royal B.C. Museum holds the greatest number of and most significant of Brown's Canadian works and continue to add to their collection. In March 2018 Friends of the BC Archives Society purchased "Giant's Castle Mountain: A.L. Fortune's Farm, Enderby B.C", dated October 6, 1882. In February 2022 Royal BC Museum purchased “Entrance to the Harbor” depicting Victoria harbour. “It was the signature painting in Brown’s 1883 exhibition, billed as the first art exhibition in the city of Victoria.”
Grafton Tyler Brown was the oldest of 4 children born on February 22, 1841 in Harrisburg Pennsylvania to Thomas and Wilhelmina. Thomas and Wilhelmina were two free Blacks who had left the slave state of Maryland for the free state of Pennsylvania in 1837.
Brown worked for a printer in Philadelphia when he was fourteen. It was there where he learned the skill of lithography. His next job, at
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