Brown, Grafton Tyler (1841-1918).

Lake Scene with Teepee by Grafton Tyler Brown (1841-1918) 18" x 30", Oil/Canvas, Signed Lower Left Est.: $25,000 - $35,000 Sold by John Moran Auctioneers for $54,625 on 10/17/2006 ARTIST WORLD RECORD

Born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Grafton Tyler Brown was an illustrator, landscape and frontier subject painter, and lithographer, who became California's first black sketch artist. He worked first for the lithography firm of Kuchel and Dresel Company, whose specialty was views of California mining towns and mining genre.

His family were freed slaves who moved from Maryland in 1837 and arrived in San Francisco from Pennsylvania in the early 1860s. He traveled extensively in that state as well as surrounding areas, painting and drawing the landscape including birds-eye town views, a painting in 1886 of the Grand Canyon, and the Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River in 1891.

In 1861, he joined a lithography business, Kuchel and Dressel, and became a part of the management of that firm. The company was known for color views of cities, and he did most of the illustrations for The Illustrated History of San Mateo County. In 1879, he dropped his involvement with this lithography firm and devoted himself to landscape painting, traveling as an itinerant throughout the Northwest.

In 1882, he was part of a geological survey team to British Columbia, and from 1886 to 1890, was settled in Portland, from where he visited Yellowstone in the summer of 1885. He spent the last twenty-five years of his life working as a civil engineer for the United States Army Corps in St. Paul, Minnesota where he died in 1918. However, he continued to list himself in city directories as an artist.

Paintings by this artist are in the collection of the Washington State Historical Society in Tacoma.

Sources:
Edan Hughes, Artists in California, 1786-1940
Harold and Peggy Samuels, Encyclopedia of Artists of the American West
Peter Hassrick, Drawn to Yellowstone
Peter Falk, Who Was Who in American Art