The bootblack Raphael

INSIDE the grand art gallery built by American circus king John Ringling, cool despite the dazzling sunshine of Sarasota, Florida, the words 'born in Durham' next to the painting stand out like the proverbial sore thumb.

Born in Durham, North Carolina perhaps? No, the artist John George Brown, says the biographical sign, was born in Durham, England.

The painting in question, titled The Longshoremen's Noon, dated 1879, reveals an artist of great technical skill, portraying 11 American dockers taking a break from labour amid piles of cotton bales, ships rigging and working horses.

All the figures are rendered with clarity and in exquisite detail, recalling the work of the British Pre-Raphaelite painters of the early 19th Century. It's a portrayal of a tough working existence, but firmly infused with warmth and sympathy.

But who was this John George Brown - and how and why did he get from Durham to America?

In fact, despite his humble beginnings in the North-East, Brown went on to become one of the most popular and commercially successful American artists of the late 19th Century, his fame and fortune largely based on hundreds of paintings of New York street children, particularly shoeshines.

It was a subject which earned him the sobriquet The Bootblack Raphael. Although perhaps regarded as chocolate boxy and overly sentimental by modern standards, Brown's vast outpouring of genre paintings was hugely popular with the public in his own day, the money from sales and reproduction rights allowing him to amass a fortune in property by the time of his death by pneumonia in New York City, 1913.

In 1899, a writer in The New York Times Magazine claimed there was barely a house in the land "if not throughout the world", which did not possess one of Brown's shoeshine paintings.

Today, his work remains in the collections of some of the USA's most prestigious art institutions and galleries including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC - which included The Longshoremen's Noon in a tour of early American painting to Florida in April this year.

You can even see some of Brown's work in Madrid. Yet, here in England, he's practically a forgotten name. Tyne & Wear Museums holds nothing by Brown; nothing of Brown's work is owned by the National Gallery in London; and a book, The Artists of Northumbria, by Marshall Hall, first published in 1973, contains a biography of Brown but makes no mention of any gallery in the UK where Brown's work can be seen.

The answer to this absence may lie in the fact that Brown appeared to become fully 'Americanised' after he emigrated there in 1853. He made one, at most two, trips back to the old country after that date and believed that American artists should only go abroad for their training - after which they should come home and paint American subjects.

There is also some confusion as to exactly where Brown came from. Most biographies state that he was born in Durham or near Durham, in 1831. Hall's The Painters of Northumbria states his birthplace as Gateshead. Either way, Brown was the son of an impoverished lawyer and had to work from an early age to support his mother, brothers and sisters. An acknowledgement of his poor roots was to stay with him for the rest of his life.

At 14, Brown was apprenticed to a glass-cutter in Newcastle for seven years. However, he also began to take evening drawing classes at the Government School of Design in Newcastle under William Bell Scott, a Scottish painter on the fringe of the Pre-Raphaelite circle whose stirring painting, Industries of the Tyne: Iron and Coal, is held by the National Trust at Wallington Hall, near Morpeth.

In the summer of 1853, Brown left the North for London to become a professional portrait painter. He stayed only three months before embarking for America, apparently influenced by the music of Englishman Henry Russell, whose popular songs advocated emigration to the West.

Brown arrived in New York on his 22nd birthday, quickly gaining a job at the Brooklyn Flint Glass Company while taking free art classes. And he obviously impressed his new boss: in 1855, he married his daughter and with his father-in-law's help opened a portrait painter's studio.

But matters soon turned sour; his wife's father died in a yellow fever epidemic and in 1857 the glass company collapsed in a general financial panic. From now on, Brown would have to paint to support his family. He went on to do so with considerable success.

Brown - or JG as he became known - soon abandoned portraiture and took up genre painting, specialising in images of childhood, first portraying idealised rural scenes and later the teeming street life of New York for which he became most associated.

From Brown's studio in Tenth Street poured hundreds of paintings of street urchins, ragamuffins, child musicians, flower sellers and, particularly in the 1880s, shoeshines and bootblacks.

In a sense, Brown was responding to the social changes around him; New York seemed to be full of itinerant children. The slang phrase for them was 'Street Arabs'; they had drifted in from the country with their parents, or were orphans of the Civil War, or, increasingly as the century grew older, poor immigrants from Europe, stuffed into filthy tenements.

But, in another sense, Brown's portrayal of these children was completely false and sentimental; his pictures of street urchins never had dirty faces and, while they may have been dressed in a semblance of rags, they had a proud nobility about them.

Brown's shoeshines, for example, may have been poor, but, in his hands, at least they were industrious and going somewhere; they possessed a drive for wealth and self-improvement, qualities which chimed with American concepts of good citizenry and the then popular novels of Horatio Alger.

In any case, Brown was simply responding to the needs of his buyers; after all, middle class art buyers did not want to hang unsettling pictures of real filthy child prostitutes and beggars above their mantelpieces.

BUT how much was Brown's choice of subject influenced by the rise from his own humble beginnings in the North-East?

Certainly, throughout his career he claimed a special sympathy with the labouring poor. A decade before his death, Brown credited his success to having created art grounded in 'the people'.

"I stand today where I did 40 years ago. I believe in the people and consider it enough for one man's life's work to interpret what the people like," he said.

But there may have been some disingenuousness about this claim since Brown, was, if anything, a shrewd businessman who followed public taste and developed his career with "canny, methodical sureness," in the words of his American biographer, Martha J Hoppin.

Brown also had the acumen, for example, to copyright his paintings, something which, through mass reproduction, helped build his average annual income to $40,000 towards the end of his life. Brown's work was so popular with the public - if not critics - that his studio was said to be always "well emptied of pictures".

But soon after his death, Brown's reputation went into a sharp decline, his work scorned by professional critics for its popular appeal. Today, his name is largely forgotten by the public, if not by those American institutions which retain the work of one of the most commercially successful artists of his day.

And as the Corcoran Gallery of Art demonstrated this year, Brown's later work can be held up against the best of them. In his latter creative years, Brown changed subject matter: instead of cute shoeshines, he began to paint sympathetic portrayals of elderly people in rural settings, and sea scenes, of which one example, The Longshoremen's Noon, has been hailed as his masterpiece. For their clarity and attention to detail, their warm portrayal of community, these later paintings will keep earning the admiration of contemporary viewers.