The Silo (Episode)
Artist
George Elmer Browne
(American, 1871-1946)
CultureAmerican
Date1938
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsOverall: 44 1/4 x 50 1/4 in. (112.4 x 127.6 cm)
Credit LineGift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.
Object number71.845
Not on view
DescriptionPainting of a farm.Label TextGeorge Elmer Browne American (1871-1946) The Silo (Episode), by 1938 Oil on canvas Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. 71.845 In the foreground of Silo (Episode), an isolated young woman is silhouetted against a darkening landscape. The vignette suggests a nonspecific but familiar narrative from 1930s fiction and film; the vulnerable figure, decaying homestead, and air of impending doom are reminiscent of The Grapes of Wrath or even The Wizard of Oz. Narrative paintings set in rural America were central to the Regionalist aesthetic of the Depression years (as seen in the paintings by Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry). Regionalist artists rejected abstraction and other European movements as alien to American values and experience. George Elmer Browne was older than Regionalism's leaders, having achieved his earliest professional success around 1900; the French government bought his painting of Cape Cod bait sellers in 1904 and made him a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1926. He kept a studio in Paris for sixteen years and led American art students on tours of France and Spain in the 1920s, but in 1933 he publicly rejected foreign art in favor of an explicitly "American" manner. Silo (Episode) was sent to England in 1944 as part of a wartime "Good Will" art exhibition organized by Artists for Victory. Browne was an early inhabitant of the Cape Cod artists' colony of Provincetown and taught there each summer until his death in 1946. Exhibition History"Three Hundred Years of American Art in the Chrysler Museum," Chrysler Museum at Norfolk, Va., March 1 - July 4, 1976. "Behind the Seen: The Chrysler's Hidden Museum," Large Changing Gallery, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Va., October 21, 2005 - February 19, 2006.
