Grafton Tyler Brown

Grafton Tyler Brown (born February 22, 1841, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died March 2, 1918, St. Paul, Minnesota) was an American lithographer, cartographer, and landscape painter of the Pacific Coast best known for his bird’s-eye-view lithographs of the region’s cities and towns and landscape paintings of the Pacific Northwest and Yellowstone National Park.

Brown’s parents were both African American and born free in the slave state of Maryland. In 1837 they relocated to Pennsylvania (where slavery had already been abolished). Little is known of them beyond that. Brown was one of five siblings, and, though their parents were of modest means, the sons had some schooling. Brown arrived in Sacramento, California, as a teenager in 1858. He found a job as a hotel steward, but he studied art on his own. In 1860, after critics praised his “inborn and self-taught style,” he went to work as an illustrator of new settlements and gold-rush towns for San Francisco lithographer Charles Kuchel. Tellingly, when the light-skinned Brown took the river steamer from Sacramento, that city’s directories had listed him as coloured. In San Francisco, however, he was listed as white, which gave him a distinct professional advantage.

Shortly after his arrival, Kuchel dispatched Brown to the Comstock Lode, a huge mass of silver mines in Nevada. Brown’s 1861 portrait of Virginia City was the first of that boomtown and his view in 1864 the second. His 15 bird’s-eye views of the Pacific Coast cities and towns were widely popular at the time. The large, colourful scenes promoted civic pride, advertised businesses, and helped provoke interest in the westward movement. Following Kuchel’s death in 1864, Brown purchased the lithography business, renaming it G.T. Brown & Co. As a way of further concealing his race, he worked with known racists (e.g., Virginian Benjamin Franklin Washington, editor of the San Francisco Examiner) on the Tideland Commission, which was established by the California legislature to sell San Francisco Bay tidelands and marshlands. Brown was hired to create lithographs of seven large-scale maps, and, though he was not recognized publicly as such, he became California’s first African American contractor.

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Brown expanded his business ventures throughout the 1870s. He bought a steam-powered lithography press, managed a staff of eight, and traveled widely for his work through California, Nevada, and Oregon, as well as British Columbia, Idaho, and Washington. Brown relied on lithography—drawing on stone—for his professional activity. He produced utilitarian but distinctive invoices for many San Francisco-based companies, including Folger Coffee Company (then J.A. Folger & Co.), Ghirardelli Chocolate Company, and Levi Strauss & Co. Overall, G.T. Brown & Co.’s lithography output included 20 scenic views, 6 large membership certificates, 15 sheet music designs, 80 mining stock certificates, and 90 maps, the latter two categories producing the biggest profit. For stock certificates, Brown often outdid his larger competitor, Britton & Rey, by incorporating an illustration to complement the mine. One of Brown’s mining scenes was copied by rival printing companies throughout the West.

In 1878 Brown created 42 of 72 lithographs for The Illustrated History of San Mateo County, documenting the area’s farmhouses, businesses, and private homes. That same year, when an economic depression killed the market for real estate maps and the exhaustion of ore mines reduced the demand for mining certificates, Brown sold the firm to his partner, William T. Galloway, who reduced its staff to four.

In 1882 Brown turned his attention exclusively to plein air landscape painting. For the next 10 years he traveled extensively. He became the first landscape painter in Victoria, British Columbia, thereafter moving to Tacoma to paint Mount Rainier and then to Portland to promote Oregon’s Mount Hood.

While in Portland, Brown served as secretary of the Portland Art Club in 1886 and 1887. The self-trained artist competed in the club’s semimonthly contests opposite European-trained painters and did well. “Go first to Nature to learn to paint landscape” was the dictum of the club. Brown moved on, following the Northern Pacific Railway, and in 1886 arrived at Yellowstone National Park, a great source of inspiration for him.

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Brown’s landscapes were popular with residents and tourists. To entice prospective buyers, he avidly promoted his product. In Victoria he displayed a book of 20 photographs of his paintings, and for Yellowstone he produced two lightweight lithographed sheets (suitable for mailing) illustrating 28 “careful studies from nature,” which would be “painted to order” and would “capture all the truths [of the park] in color.”

Brown’s eye for detail carried over into his oil paintings. He painted scenes of British Columbia with a multitude of tiny strokes and signed them with a small, cramped signature. The tall snowcapped mountains and brilliant sunsets of the Pacific Northwest inspired more vivid colours and a bolder signature to match. Yellowstone’s yellow and orange rock provoked a more impressionistic style, characterized by large brushstrokes.

In 1892 Brown relocated to St. Paul, Minnesota, where he worked as a draftsman for the Army Corps of Engineers until 1897. He then worked with the city’s engineering department until 1910. He remained in St. Paul for the rest of his life.

Since 1935, scholars have characterized Brown as African American. In his pioneering California on Stone (1935)—a study on the lithography coverage of the Gold Rush—Harry T. Peters cited the 1922 memoirs of lithographer Max Schmidt, who was the proprietor of California’s largest lithography printing firm. In his memoirs, Schmidt recounted that in 1872 he had worked for the “colored man” G.T. Brown.