Along with Martin Johnson Heade, William Mason Brown was among a very elite group of artists equally adept at landscape painting as well as still-life painting. He was born in upstate New York in 1828, in the city of Troy, where he also began his art studies under Thomas Grinnell and later with the portraitist, Abel B. Moore. In 1850, at the age of twenty two, he followed Moore to Newark, NJ, where he continued his art education. After his apprenticeship portraitist period was complete he began to paint landscapes, inspired by Thomas Cole and the romantic artists of the Hudson River School.

As the period of his landscape production largely covers the years of 1850 to 1869 his style of painting most resembles that of the Pre-Raphaeli...