The Art Gallery at the Athenaeum contains one of America’s unique collections of 19th century American paintings. Each week we will feature a different work on this page. We hope educators will use this link as a tool to enrich their art curriculum. Vermonters and other citizens throughout the nation can now visit our gallery in this new, intimate, and informative way.
The text describing each painting was written by Mark D. Mitchell, Assistant Curator of Nineteenth-Century Art at the National Academy Museum. The digital images were prepared by Robert Jenks of Jenks Studio of Photography in St. Johnsbury, VT.
Please note that the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum prohibits the use of images from its collection in public exhibition, broadcast, electronic reproduction or publication in any form without prior written permission from the institution. If you would like to reproduce any of the Art Gallery images in any form, contact Irwin Gelber at 748-8291, extension 307.
John George Brown (1831-1913), British-American
Hiding in the Old Oak, 1873-74 OIL ON CANVAS, 30 x 25 1/8 inches
Gift of Horace Fairbanks
J. G. Brown, as the artist is commonly known, enjoyed a long and successful career as a painter of childhood scenes. Born to a poor family in northern England, Brown enjoyed painting idyllic portraits of rural and working-class children, subjects with whom he felt personal kinship. He imbued his subjects with hope, optimism, and plucky spirit, trails that garnered a ready and enthusiastic audience in America.
Begun in the same year that Brown turned his primary attention from rural to urban scenes, Hiding in the Old Oak distills the aspects of rural childhood that were the artist's early trademarks and that justify the painting's reputation among the most popular compositions in the Athenaeum’s collection to the present day. Three girls, dressed in white or brightly-colored dresses and aprons have chosen the womb-like hollow of an ancient tree as their hiding place in a game of hide-and-go-seek. The leftmost figure leans back against the tree's trunk, mimicking its diagonal with her body, as she restrains her dress with her right hand to prevent it from fluttering in the breeze and giving them away. Nature, in this view, is a benevolent, protective presence in the world, aligned with the innocence of youth. An angular, skeletal branch at the composition's upper right sounds the only cautionary note of mortality.
Decades later, Brown reported to Mrs. Fairbanks that he began this composition during the summer of 1873 while in the town of Boiceville, in upstate New York. Like his landscape painter colleagues, Brown would usually travel outside of New York City during the summer in search of subjects in the rural landscape, then return to the city for the winter months to work up his studies into final compositions in the studio and exhibit the best of them in the National Academy of Design's annual exhibitions in the early spring. According to the artist, Fairbanks bought this painting directly from the Academy's annual exhibition in 1874.