This European landscape is painted in muted gray-green tones to the point of suggesting purple. Five poplar trees stretch across the canvas and screen out the tops of a thicker stand of trees growing down in a valley in the near distance. Flat, vegetation-topped mountains tower in the background, with steep sides of bare rock. This painting has been in the gallery since 1918.
(1859-1920)
One of the original members of the Eagle’s Nest Art Colony, Browne was its premier landscape artist. Browne studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and then was a student of Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Afterward, he pursued further studies in Paris. In 1890 he moved to Chicago. There, he taught painting and lectured on art history at the Art Institue. Browne served as president of the Chicago Society of Artists and director of the Western Society of Artists.
Browne was married to one of Lorado Taft’s sisters and was the father of the child born at the Eagle’s Nest Art Colony. The couple divorced in 1908. During the summer of 1919, while at the Eagle’s Nest Camp, Browne was stricken with paralysis. He spent the autumn near Chicago, then went back to his mother’s home in Waltham, Massachusetts, where he died the following March.
Another one of his Ogle County landscapes, “Moonlight, Oregon, Illinois,” belongs to the Union League Club of Chicago.