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Howdy Partner!
On this day in 1836, Bret Harte was born.
A contemporary of Samuel Clemens, Harte wrote early Western novels as well as poems and magazine articles. Today's sublime landscape by Grafton Tyler Brown conjures Harte's popular works about the frontier.
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. This work may have been based on sketches he made while traveling, or on commercial photographs available at the time.
Source: Free within Ourselves (exhibition text, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1992).
Pictured: Grafton Tyler Brown, 1841–1918, View of the Lower Falls, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 1890, oil, 30 1/4 x 20 1/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment and the Smithsonian Collections Acquisition Program.