About the Artist

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  • Unknown photographer. Gertrude LeRoy Brown. 1928. Reproduced in the Evanston News-Index. September 28, 1934. Courtesy Evanston Public Library, Evanston, Ill.

    Shortly after the artist’s birth, around 1870, her parents died, and she was adopted by Charles and Celia F. Brown, of Evanston, Illinois. She attended public school in Evanston, earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy at Northwestern University in 1892, and pursued graduate study there until 1895, when she took a job as a librarian at the Evanston Free Library. Brown never married, and she worked at the library until her death, at age sixty-four. Her obituary in the Evanston News mentioned that “the art of photography” was her “avocation.”

    Brown studied photography with the influential teacher and Pictorialist Clarence H. White. Her outstanding achievement as a librarian was the cataloguing of the Sadie Knowland Coe Memorial Music Collection; Sadie Coe was married to George Coe, who taught philosophy and religious education at Northwestern when Brown studied there. As George Coe taught at Columbia Teachers College from 1909 to 1927, where White taught from 1907 to 1922, it is entirely possible that Coe suggested to Brown that she come east to study photography with White, whose Clarence H. White School of Photography was based in New York.

    We know that Brown was a student of White’s in 1915, when she was forty-five years old. That year a work by Brown, Shadows on the Sand, was included in a juried exhibition of Pictorial photographs organized by White at the Print Gallery, at 707 Fifth Avenue. A work called By the Sea was included in a 1917 White School alumni association exhibition, and Brown joined the Pictorial Photographers of America (PPA) in 1918, its first year. In 1920, A Moment’s Rest (which may be a self-portrait) was included in the PPA’s first annual exhibition, and in 1924 Brown’s Studio Window appeared in Camera Pictures, an alumni annual. Perhaps Brown had attended the White School’s summer session in Maine in 1914—a year in which avant-garde painter Max Weber’s presence there is documented—and enrolled in the New York school that fall.

    Weber, who taught at the school from 1914 to 1918, inspired many of his colleagues and students to produce portraits of him as mementos. His daughter Joy Weber had a collection of these portraits, including works by Karl Struss, Paul Anderson, Arthur Chapman, and Bernard Shea Horne. Brown’s portrait Max Weber (MoMA 1640.2001) was such a memento. The image combines a full-length view of Weber standing in a doorway with a near-profile close-up of his face. Among Brown’s few extant works, none is as daring as this portrait. Weber’s exhortation to experiment may have inspired her. Otherwise, Brown seems a conventional amateur who found personal expression in Pictorial photography.

    —Bonnie Yochelson

Meeting Points

Artist Chronology

December 28, 1869
Born
At location: Gertrude LeRoy Brown
Chicago
1871
Her parents die in a house fire and she is taken in by Charles and Celia F. Brown
At location: Gertrude LeRoy Brown
Chicago
1892–95
Pursues postgraduate studies in philosophy, political economy, and English literature at Northwestern University
At location: Gertrude LeRoy Brown
Evanston
1895–1934
Works as a cataloger at the Evanston Free Public Library
At location: Gertrude LeRoy Brown
Evanston
Summer 1914
Studies at the Clarence White School of Photography
At location: Gertrude LeRoy Brown
New York
1915
Exhibits at the Ehrich Galleries
Participant: Gertrude LeRoy Brown
New York
1915–16
Studies at the Clarence White School of Photography
At location: Gertrude LeRoy Brown
New York
March 1916
Third Annual Pittsburgh Salon of Photography
Participant: Gertrude LeRoy Brown
Pittsburgh
1917
Becomes a member of Pictorial Photographers of America
At location: Gertrude LeRoy Brown
New York
1924–25
Publishes photographs in Camera Pictures
New York
September 28, 1934
Dies
At location: Gertrude LeRoy Brown
New York

Walther Photographs

View this artist's works in MoMA's Online Collection

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