Mary Cummings Browne (1861-1939)

About the Artist

Mary Cummings Browne (also Brown) was born in 1861 in Newark, New Jersey to Matilda and Leonard P. Browne, a superintendent of a jewelry manufacturer. Browne was the eldest of four children. Her sister Matilda Browne (1869-1947) was a noted American Impressionist known as the “American Rosa Bonheur” due to her penchant for painting farm scenes and cattle. Matilda, crippled by an accident at the age of eight and unable to play with other children amused herself by watching her neighbor, the artist Thomas Moran (1837-1926) at work. Moran took pity on the child and offered her a pencil and crayon which was the start of her life as an artist.[1] Matilda began painting at the age of twelve and went on to study in Paris in 1889 under Julian DuPre. She further studied under American artists Eleanor (1854-1917) and Kathleen Greatorex (1851-1942) and Carleton Wiggins (1848-1932). Matilda Browne was the first woman artist member of the Old Lyme, Connecticut art colony.[2]