Game Birds

Brookes’s first California still lifes were influenced by 17th-century Dutch and Flemish prototypes and included an abundance of game in somber hues. These qualities largely disappeared in his later work, which became sparer and lighter in tone and typically depicted smaller assemblies of fruit, game, or fish set against stone walls.

In 1839, Brookes took drawing lessons from two portrait painters in Chicago, his only known art instruction. He then earned his living as an itinerant portrait painter from 1841, traveling to small towns seeking commissions. He painted his first recorded still life in 1858 and departed for San Francisco in 1862. At first he supported himself as a portraitist, but rapidly became the state’s preeminent still-life painter.