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Charles DeWolf Brownell

Charles DeWolf Brownell

(1822-1909) ~ Inducted 2011

 Charles DeWolf Brownell was born in Providence in 1822 to parents from old-line Rhode Island families. When Brownell was two-years-old, the family moved to East Hartford where Charles was raised and grew to manhood. In 1843, he became an attorney and lived in a house directly opposite Connecticut’s famed Charter Oak.   He later rendered a well-known painting of that historical

After a decade of practice, Brownell abandoned his career as a lawyer, having become enamored of landscape painting as a result of his sketching trips through the Connecticut River Valley with artist Henry Bryant.

In 1857 Charles set up a studio in Hartford, but soon moved to New York City where he became acquainted with such Hudson River School artists as Frederick Church and John Kensett. An avid sailor, Brownell took many boat trips to Narragansett Bay which became a subject of his paintings, most notably The Fog Eater A Little After Sunrise Off Old Fort Lewis.

In 1865 Charles married Henrietta Knowlton Angell Pierce of Bristol, Rhode Island prompting him to take up permanent residence on Walley Street in that bayside town. From his Bristol base, Charles and his family (a wife and four sons) traveled extensively in Europe during the 1870s. Here he painted some of his finest works. Later Brownell’s solo expeditions took him to the Hudson River Valley, the Caribbean, Mexico, Cuba, South America, and the American Southwest. He captured the beauty of all these areas in his paintings. In June 1909, twelve years after the death of his wife, the wandering Brownell (who had taken a round-the-world cruise in 1897-98) finally came to rest and was buried in Bristol’s Juniper Hill Cemetery.

Many of Brownell’s best known paintings--Pinkham Notch, White Mountains, The Charter Oak, and The Burning of the Gaspee reflect the spirit and talent of a Rhode Island renaissance man who compiled an impressive collection of artistic works during his fifty-year career.

- (Dr.) Patrick T. Conley


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