WILLIAM THEOPHILUS BROWN
Painter, 1919-2012

By modulating primaries with tints and shades, frosted greens, bleached blues, elephant grays, shell pinks, and creamed citrons band together to glow with a unique light....Mr. Brown has issued an urgent invitation allowing us to witness not only what he has seen, but how he has seen it - a world that combines our mutuals world with an imagined one - a vista becoming a vision. Through these works he has developed a rare opportunity of another way of knowing something special about people and places and things in the wordless world of painting.
- Wayne Thiebaud, Theophilus Brown: Recent Paintings, John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, 1983

Always a figurative painter, Brown's esthetic sensibility was formed through his postwar contract with Picasso, Braque, Giacometti, and other artists in Paris; the influence of Willem de Kooning's mentoring in New York; and his heady rapport with David Park, Elmer Bischoff, Paul Wonner, Richard Diebenkorn, James Weeks, and Nathan Oliveira in Berkeley and San Francisco. Today this close knit group of painters has attained legendary status in American art.
- John Arthur, Theophilus Brown - Paintings, Collages, & Drawings, Chameleon Books, 2007

Brown insists on the corporeal reality of his figures, their activity and vivid presence (although they may be a dream). His characters are similarly knowing and suggestive in their paradisiacal encounters, disturbing the cool classicism of the Bay Area Figurative style.
- Caroline A. Jones, Bay Area Figurative Art, 1950-1965, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, University of California Press

With William Theophilus Brown the personalization of landscape is taken a step further. The work of Edvard Munch and other European symbolist artists provided a strong influence through which Brown filtered his impressions of nature.
- Steven A. Nash, Facing Eden: 100 Years of Landscape Art in the Bay Area, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Education
Yale University, B.A., 1941; University of California, Berkeley, M.A., 1952

Selected Solo Exhibitions 1950-1965
Landau Gallery, 1957, 1960, 1963, 1965; Barone Gallery, New York, 1961; Hollis Galleries, San Francisco, 1964; Crocker Art Musuem, Sacramento, 1965.

Selected Group Exhibitions 1950-1965
72nd Annual Painting and Sculpture Exhibition of the San Francisco Art Association, San Francisco Museum of Art, 1953; 17th Annual Watercolor Exhibition of the SFAA, San Francisco Museum of Art, 1954; Fifth Annual Oil and Sculpture Exhibition, Richmond Art Center, 1955; Annual Painting and Sculpture Exhibition, San Francisco Museum of Art, 1956, 1957, 1958; Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Painting, Oakland Art Museum, 1957; Fresh Paint, M.H. De Young Memorial Museum, 1958; Artist Member's Exhibition, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, 1958; Third Pacific Coast Biennial, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1959; Winter Invitational, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, 1960; 64th American Exhibition: Painting, Sculpture, The Art Institute of Chicago, 1961; Artists West of the Mississippi: The Realistic Image, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, 1963.