{"id":52300,"date":"2017-03-10T19:44:54","date_gmt":"2017-03-10T19:44:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=52300"},"modified":"2017-03-10T19:44:54","modified_gmt":"2017-03-10T19:44:54","slug":"the-missing-british-columbia-paintings-of-grafton-tyler-brown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=52300","title":{"rendered":"The Missing British Columbia Paintings of Grafton Tyler Brown"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Missing British Columbia Paintings of Grafton Tyler Brown<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

2015-02-27<\/p>\n

John Lutz<\/strong><\/a>, Professor of History
\nUniversity of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nGrafton Tyler Brown<\/a> in his Victoria<\/a> studio, 1883, Image A-08775 \u00a0courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives.<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Grafton Tyler Brown<\/a> became the first professional artist in the province when he reinvented himself in his move to British Columbia<\/a> in 1882. Two years later he headed south to Tacoma<\/a> and has since become famous in the United States<\/a> as the first and one of the best Black professional artists in California<\/a> and the Pacific Northwest<\/a>. Practically unknown now, his paintings of the Fraser<\/a>, Thompson<\/a>, Okanagan<\/a>, and Similkameen Valleys<\/a> as well as southern Vancouver Island<\/a>, were celebrated in Victoria<\/a> in 1883 when he opened his inaugural exhibition. But Brown, the famous American Black artist, was, surprisingly, a White artist in British Columbia!<\/p>\n

Brown was African American by birth. His parents, Thomas and Wilhelmina, were two free Blacks who had left the slave state of Maryland<\/a> for the free state of Pennsylvania<\/a> in 1837. Grafton Tyler Brown born February 22, 1841, was the first of three sons and a daughter, all of whom appear as Black in the censuses of the period…<\/p>\n

…Whether by chance or more likely by craft, when Grafton Tyler Brown, who had inherited his father\u2019s lighter colouring, was enumerated by the San Francisco<\/a> directory makers for the 1861, he was listed without the designation \u201ccoloured\u201d applied to Blacks. The 1870 census taker called him a \u201cMulatto<\/a>\u201d suggesting he was thought to have only one African American parent while that same year the Dun and Bradstreet<\/a> credit agency called him a \u201cquadroon<\/a>\u201d meaning that he was thought to have a single African American grandparent. In the census of 1880 he was listed as \u201cWhite\u201d. Race, the idea that people can be rigidly separated by their looks, proved itself to be quite arbitrary and open to interpretation…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Grafton Tyler Brown became the first professional artist in the province when he reinvented himself in his move to British Columbia in 1882. Two years later he headed south to Tacoma and has since become famous in the United States as the first and one of the best Black professional artists in California and the Pacific Northwest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,24,1245,19,8,6462,20],"tags":[2138,455,26396,16524,26395,9568,5336],"class_list":["post-52300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-arts","category-biography","category-canada","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-british-columbia","tag-california","tag-grafton-t-brown","tag-grafton-tyler-brown","tag-john-lutz","tag-san-francisco","tag-victoria"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52300"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52300\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52302,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52300\/revisions\/52302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}