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Waiting for William
Artist:
John George Brown
(American, 1831-1913)
Date: 1879
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions:
30 x 20 in. (76.2 x 50.8 cm)
Overall, Frame: 45 x 36 in. (114.3 x 91.4 cm)
Classification: American art
Credit Line: Gift of the Mowbray Arch Society
Object number: 98.23
Terms
- Woman
- Water
- Seascape
- White
- Brown
- Black
- Yellow
- Red
- Tan
- Portrait
- Genre
- Brooklyn, New York
In Collection(s)
On view
DescriptionThis 19th-century American genre painting depicts a well-dressed young woman who sits alone on a empty beach, near the water's edge. Sitting slouched on a wooden support, she gazes out to sea, perhaps with thoughts of the William in the title of the painting. The point of her parasol rests between two L's of William's name, which she has written in the sand. She is dressed in a very fine white dress with a pale yellow shawl and barely holds the matching yellow parasol with her right hand.
Exhibition History"Reopening of the Joan P. Brock Galleries," Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Va., Opening in March of 2008.
"American Treasures at the Willoughby-Baylor House," Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA, January 2 - December 1, 2013.
"American Treasures at the Willoughby-Baylor House," Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA, January 2 - December 1, 2013.
Label textJohn George Brown
American, 1831–1913
Waiting for William, 1879
Oil on canvas
Hope, fear, sadness, and affection—such complex emotions bring life to this young woman’s face as she dreams of a loved one far away. This painting by John George Brown depicting a fancily dressed young woman gazing longingly out to sea leaves much to the imagination. It also borrows from the popular culture of the Victorian period, for the melancholic theme of the woman faithfully waiting by the sea was a staple of late nineteenth-century sentimental poetry and parlor songs.
Gift of the Mowbray Arch Society 98.23
American, 1831–1913
Waiting for William, 1879
Oil on canvas
Hope, fear, sadness, and affection—such complex emotions bring life to this young woman’s face as she dreams of a loved one far away. This painting by John George Brown depicting a fancily dressed young woman gazing longingly out to sea leaves much to the imagination. It also borrows from the popular culture of the Victorian period, for the melancholic theme of the woman faithfully waiting by the sea was a staple of late nineteenth-century sentimental poetry and parlor songs.
Gift of the Mowbray Arch Society 98.23
Published References
Martha N. Hagood and Jefferson C. Harrison, _American Art at the Chrysler Museum: Selected Paintings, Sculpture, and Drawings_ (Norfolk, Va.: Chrysler Museum of Art, 2005), 96-97, no. 57. ISBN: 0-940744-71-6
Jeff Harrison, _Collecting with Vision: Treasures From the Chrysler Museum of Art_ (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2007), 66, fig. 71. ISBN: 978-0-940744-72-1
American Psychiatric Association, _Psychiatric Services: A Journal of the American Psychiatric Association_ Vol.58 No. 7 (July 2007) Cover. ISSN: 1075-2730
Martha Hoppin, _The World of J.G. Brown_, (Chesterfield, MA: Chameleon Books, 2010), 106.
Provenance
Private collection, New York; Spanierman Gallery; Gift of the Mowbray Arch Society to Chrysler Museum of Art, 1998.
Catalogue EntryWaiting for William, 1879
Oil on canvas, 30 × 20 in. (76.2 × 50.8 cm)
Signed and dated lower right: J.G. Brown N.A.
1879
Gift of the Mowbray Arch Society, 1998, 98.23
At the dawn of the twentieth century, J.G. Brown was America's richest and best-known genre painter. His fame and fortune rested largely on his depictions of New York street children, which he focused on from the mid-1870s. Recalling the youthful protagonists in the rags-to-riches novels of Horatio Alger, Brown's sentimental portrayals of plucky newsboys and bootblacks proved immensely popular among wealthy American collectors. A shrewd businessman himself, by 1900 he was earning $40,000 a year from painting sales and royalties from lithographic reproductions.
Born and raised in England, Brown trained in a glass-cutting factory in Newcastle-on-Tyne, though he took evening art classes both in Newcastle and, later, at the Trustees Academy in Edinburgh. In 1853, following a brief stint in London as a portrait painter, he sailed for America and settled in Brooklyn. By 1860 he had moved to New York and secured working space in the newly opened Tenth Street Studio Building, the city's most prestigious atelier. In New York Brown turned to genre painting. Both the precise, descriptive realism of his genre images and their emphasis on narrative anecdote can be traced in part to the paintings of David Wilkie and the Pre-Raphaelites, whose work he had studied in England. He was also influenced by the paintings of American Pre-Raphaelites such as Charles Herbert Morse.
Though street children would remain his signature subject, around 1880 Brown produced a far more ambitious group of genre pictures celebrating America's adult laborers. These include his masterpiece, The Longshoremen's Noon (1879, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), and the Chrysler's impressive Pull for the Shore of 1878.
Pull for the Shorewas inspired by Brown's visits to Grand Manan Island, off the coast of Maine, during the summers of 1877 and 1878. He was particularly impressed by the island's hardy fishermen: "I went to Grand Menan [sic]," he later proclaimed, "and painted them from life-their fish, their clothes, their boats." The visits resulted in a number of studies and several finished oils, the largest and most important of which is the Chrysler's canvas. The painting depicts a group of fishermen-seven men and a boy-in a boat on the open sea. While one man works the rudder and the boy serves as guide at the prow, the others row vigorously toward a rocky coast, visible in the distance. As Linda Ferber notes, both the work's nautical subject and the image of the boy silhouetted against the sky recall Winslow Homer's famous 1876 painting Breezing Up: A Fair Wind(National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). Homer was also a tenant of the Tenth Street Studio Building during the 1870s, thus giving Brown ample opportunity to study that work. Like The Longshoremen's Noon, Pull for the Shoreclearly serves as a Victorian paean to the manly, working-class virtues of physical strength, steadfastness, and cooperative effort. Brown exhibited the painting twice in 1878, at the National Academy of Design in New York, where he offered it for $1,500, and at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. A smaller version of the painting is today in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
At the same time that he was painting the fishermen of Grand Manan, Brown was focusing on thematically consonant images of women seated or standing alone at water's edge and gazing wistfully out to sea. Among the loveliest of these is his 1879 Waiting for William, in which a beautiful young woman, poignantly dressed in her finest clothes, sits at oceanside and surveys the watery horizon, longing for her beloved to return from the sea. With the point of her parasol, she has written his name-William-in the sand. Is William's return imminent, or is he late in coming home? Has he already been lost at sea, never to return? As is the case with other examples of high Victorian narrative genre, Brown's work leaves much to the imagination.
The melancholic theme of the woman faithfully waiting by the sea was a staple of late-nineteenth-century sentimental poetry and of such popular parlor songs as "By the Sad Sea- Waves." Indeed, Brown appropriated that title for another of his paintings in this vein, a picture of a mournful young woman standing at seaside that he exhibited in 1878 at the National Academy of Design, alongside Pull for the Shore.
JCH
Martha N. Hagood and Jefferson C. Harrison, _American Art at the Chrysler Museum: Selected Paintings, Sculpture, and Drawings_ (Norfolk, Va.: Chrysler Museum of Art, 2005), 96-97, no. 57.
Oil on canvas, 30 × 20 in. (76.2 × 50.8 cm)
Signed and dated lower right: J.G. Brown N.A.
1879
Gift of the Mowbray Arch Society, 1998, 98.23
At the dawn of the twentieth century, J.G. Brown was America's richest and best-known genre painter. His fame and fortune rested largely on his depictions of New York street children, which he focused on from the mid-1870s. Recalling the youthful protagonists in the rags-to-riches novels of Horatio Alger, Brown's sentimental portrayals of plucky newsboys and bootblacks proved immensely popular among wealthy American collectors. A shrewd businessman himself, by 1900 he was earning $40,000 a year from painting sales and royalties from lithographic reproductions.
Born and raised in England, Brown trained in a glass-cutting factory in Newcastle-on-Tyne, though he took evening art classes both in Newcastle and, later, at the Trustees Academy in Edinburgh. In 1853, following a brief stint in London as a portrait painter, he sailed for America and settled in Brooklyn. By 1860 he had moved to New York and secured working space in the newly opened Tenth Street Studio Building, the city's most prestigious atelier. In New York Brown turned to genre painting. Both the precise, descriptive realism of his genre images and their emphasis on narrative anecdote can be traced in part to the paintings of David Wilkie and the Pre-Raphaelites, whose work he had studied in England. He was also influenced by the paintings of American Pre-Raphaelites such as Charles Herbert Morse.
Though street children would remain his signature subject, around 1880 Brown produced a far more ambitious group of genre pictures celebrating America's adult laborers. These include his masterpiece, The Longshoremen's Noon (1879, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), and the Chrysler's impressive Pull for the Shore of 1878.
Pull for the Shorewas inspired by Brown's visits to Grand Manan Island, off the coast of Maine, during the summers of 1877 and 1878. He was particularly impressed by the island's hardy fishermen: "I went to Grand Menan [sic]," he later proclaimed, "and painted them from life-their fish, their clothes, their boats." The visits resulted in a number of studies and several finished oils, the largest and most important of which is the Chrysler's canvas. The painting depicts a group of fishermen-seven men and a boy-in a boat on the open sea. While one man works the rudder and the boy serves as guide at the prow, the others row vigorously toward a rocky coast, visible in the distance. As Linda Ferber notes, both the work's nautical subject and the image of the boy silhouetted against the sky recall Winslow Homer's famous 1876 painting Breezing Up: A Fair Wind(National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). Homer was also a tenant of the Tenth Street Studio Building during the 1870s, thus giving Brown ample opportunity to study that work. Like The Longshoremen's Noon, Pull for the Shoreclearly serves as a Victorian paean to the manly, working-class virtues of physical strength, steadfastness, and cooperative effort. Brown exhibited the painting twice in 1878, at the National Academy of Design in New York, where he offered it for $1,500, and at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. A smaller version of the painting is today in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
At the same time that he was painting the fishermen of Grand Manan, Brown was focusing on thematically consonant images of women seated or standing alone at water's edge and gazing wistfully out to sea. Among the loveliest of these is his 1879 Waiting for William, in which a beautiful young woman, poignantly dressed in her finest clothes, sits at oceanside and surveys the watery horizon, longing for her beloved to return from the sea. With the point of her parasol, she has written his name-William-in the sand. Is William's return imminent, or is he late in coming home? Has he already been lost at sea, never to return? As is the case with other examples of high Victorian narrative genre, Brown's work leaves much to the imagination.
The melancholic theme of the woman faithfully waiting by the sea was a staple of late-nineteenth-century sentimental poetry and of such popular parlor songs as "By the Sad Sea- Waves." Indeed, Brown appropriated that title for another of his paintings in this vein, a picture of a mournful young woman standing at seaside that he exhibited in 1878 at the National Academy of Design, alongside Pull for the Shore.
JCH
Martha N. Hagood and Jefferson C. Harrison, _American Art at the Chrysler Museum: Selected Paintings, Sculpture, and Drawings_ (Norfolk, Va.: Chrysler Museum of Art, 2005), 96-97, no. 57.
