John George Brown
New York/California, (1831-1913)
Cheer Up, 1905
oil on canvas
signed and dated lower left, gilt-framed.

Brown was born and raised in poverty in Durham, England, where he worked as an apprentice in the field of glassworks, eventually moving to Brooklyn at age 22 (in 1853) where he found a job at the Brooklyn Flint Glass Company. He ended up marrying the daughter of the owner of the factory, and his father-in-law supported him as a painter. Unlike the socially critical work of his contemporaries including Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine or Theodore Dreiser who depicted the harsh reality of life on the streets for the tens of thousands of poor homeless kids left to fend for themselves across New York City, Brown chose to depict these same young street urchins as cheerful, healthy, clean and happy young business people. He focused on paperboys, dock hands, flower sellers, match vendors and those who shined shoes--which earned him the nickname "the bootblack Raphael." His allegorical message seemed to promote the ideal of the American self-made man, the confirmation of how hard work and personal responsibility were the basis of American life. Here we have a young smiling boy who has left the tools of his shoe shining trade (various brushes, a circular container of shoe wax, a bottle of shoe oil, a little broom, and a rag) carefully laid out on the floor in front of him as he takes a break to pat his cute little dog. The boy is seated on his own shoe shine box and next to a larger wooden crate that appear to have been artificially placed within the artist's studio--rather than out on a street corner where the artist probably came across this young model for his painting. Brown included the boy's own worn and tattered boots and stockings, an authentic element within an otherwise idealized portrait of a young immigrant child left to his own devices on the streets of New York. Brown's positive and sentimental depictions of street children become incredibly popular in his own time, ironically making him wealthy and famous for his work based on unknown strays and orphans.
24 x 17 inches