Born in Durham in northern England, John George Brown studied art while training as a glass-cutter in Newcastle-upon-Tyne; he continued his studies at the Edinburgh Royal Academy. After a short stay in London, Brown emigrated to the United States in 1853, studied at the National Academy of Design, and opened a portrait studio in Brooklyn, New York. In 1860 he took a studio in New York City’s Tenth Street Building, an important artists’ enclave, where his fellow tenants eventually included Eastman Johnson and Winslow Homer, whom he greatly admired. In the 1860s and 1870s Johnson and Homer, along with many other American figural artists, turned their attention momentarily to themes of childhood, but Brown devoted his long and prolific career almost entirely to American youth. He painted both rural and urban children, particularly the solitary newspaper peddlers and shoe-shine boys for which he became best known; he also painted complex genre scenes featuring adults, as well as landscapes. Brown was active in numerous artists’ institutions of his day. A sound businessman, he prospered by painting what the public wanted; furthermore, he astutely copyrighted his works, many of which were widely circulated as chromolithographs, an inexpensive form of colored reproduction.

Through his early membership in the American Watercolor Society (founded in New York City in 1866), Brown was associated with the American pre-Raphaelite movement, whose adherents followed the dictum of English critic John Ruskin (1819–1900) that the artist record nature with exacting fidelity. This influence is clear in the artist’s careful attention to detail, particularly the texture of natural objects and the effects of sunlight and shadow. Yet Brown’s interpretation of childhood in America was indebted to American and English genre traditions and to popular imagery: sentimental as well as penetrating, his paintings of children are charged with moral and narrative content. His innocent, wholesome, barefoot country youth promised renewal after the trauma of the Civil War and his hardy, jolly young city bootblacks and newspaper sellers reassuringly refuted the seething social chaos and misery of exploding urban centers. Brown considered himself a reformist and a realist, however, and he sympathized with his subjects as one who had risen from an impoverished childhood.