JOHN GEORGE BROWN | GREAT RISKS FOR SMALL GAINS

Private collection, Pennsylvania

Sold: Freeman's, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, December 3, 2006, lot 49

Private collection (acquired at the above sale)

[with]Alexander Gallery, New York

Acquired by the present owner from the above, 2007

"Art in New York," Boston Daily Evening Transcript, January 21, 1878, p. 3

"The Artists' Fund Sale," New York Daily Tribune, January 23, 1878, p. 8

"Artists' Fund Sale," New York Times, January 23, 1878, p. 2

Martha Hoppin, The World of J.G. Brown, Chesterfield, Massachusetts, 2010, pp. 120, 246, illustrated p. 121

John George Brown spent the summers of 1877 and 1878 on Grand Manan, a remote island in the Bay of Fundy nine miles off the coast of Maine and Canada. He was not the first artist to explore the island—Frederic Church, William Bradford, Edward Moran, and Alfred Bricher had also traveled to Grand Manan in preceding years.

The present work is a larger, more detailed version of Brown's After Gull's Eggs (1877, unlocated). Both works bear a close relation to a contemporaneous illustration by Winslow Homer entitled Raid on a Sand Swallow Colony—"How Many Eggs?," which was published in the June 13, 1874 edition of Harper's Weekly.