Jest a Fool

Byron Browne's Jester invites play on April Fool's Day.

How did Browne learn to paint such beguiling works?

Like many American artworks of the 1930s, Jester is a product of both classical training and European avant-garde influences.

Browne's artistic training followed traditional lines. From 1925 to 1928, he studied at the National Academy of Design, where in his last year he won the prestigious Third Hallgarten Prize for a still-life composition. Yet before finishing his studies, Browne discovered the newly established Gallery of Living Art. There and through his friends John Graham and Arshile Gorky, he became fascinated with Picasso, Braque, Miro, and other modern masters.

Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg. The Patricia and Phillip Frost Collection: American Abstraction 1930–1945 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1989).

Pictured: Byron Browne, 1907–61, Jester, 1952, oil, 28 x 24 1/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Harris J. Klein.