William Mason Brown was born in Troy, New York, where he studied for several years with local artists, including the leading portraitist there, Abel Buel Moore. In 1850, he moved to Newark, New Jersey, and began painting romantic landscapes in a meticulous style reminiscent of the Hudson River School. In 1858, Brown moved to Brooklyn, where he worked for the rest of his career, exhibiting annually at the National Academy of Design, New York, from 1859 to 1890, and at the Brooklyn Art Association from 1865 to 1886.
Brown was undoubtedly exposed to the teachings of John Ruskin, which so greatly affected American artists during the late 1850s and 1860s. The Ruskinian, or Pre-Raphaelite, influence is reflected in Brown’s crisply painted, meticulously detailed still lifes, including the present work. William H. Gerdts has said of the artist:
[Brown’s] still lifes are the most meticulous and photographic of his generation and during his lifetime his technique was compared to that of the great French academician, Jean-Léon Gérôme. . . . Brown almost never allowed his paint handling to be apparent. He reveled in textural duplication: the “halo” of the fuzziness of a peach, the “map” of the rind of a cantaloupe. In painting humbler fruits—berries and cherries—each particular item in a group had its own color, its own highlight, its own quality of weight (Painters of the Humble Truth [1981], p. 102).
