Browne, George 1918 - 1958
Born in New York City in 1918, George Browne was the son of the noted artist, mountaineer, and sportsman Belmore Browne, 1880-1954. Though a premature death resulting from a firearms accident at the age of forty cut short his promising career, George Browne is acknowledged by collectors today as one of the century's finest sporting artists and bird painters.
The Browne family moved to Banff, Alberta in George's infancy. George grew up in an environment of art and outdoor adventure, influenced both by his father and by well-known Banff painter Carl Rungius.
In addition to structured art training with his father from an early age, George studied art for four years at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. From 1940-42, he assisted his father in producing background paintings for several large mammal groups at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Browne was married in 1948, and the young couple settled in Seebe, Alberta, midway between Banff and Calgary. He set about establishing a career as a painter of wildlife in oils. Gallery affiliations, commissions and contacts with wealthy sportsmen soon followed. Browne moved his family to Connecticut in the mid-1950s and was well on his way to widespread prominence when his life and career ended by his tragic death in 1958.
The famous wildlife painter Francis Lee Jaques is quoted in a 1993 Sporting Classics article on Browne, " I fear I was a little jealous of George Browne's work, as I don't believe I was of any other artist. His work was a breakthrough."
One of Browne's greatest strengths was his ability to integrate fully developed wildlife images, especially birds, in a convincing way into fully realized natural settings.