Bryson Burroughs

The paintings of Bryson Burroughs are of the romantically imaginative sort, by preference attached to themes of classical mythology. The dreamy idealism of Puvis de Chavannes (whose pupil Burroughs was) pervaded the work of the disciple. But Burroughs’s own appreciation of artistic masterpieces was not limited to any school of painting. In his official position with the Metropolitan Museum, it was his urgent recommendation which achieved in 1907 the purchase for that institution of Renoir’s magnificent “Madame Charpentier”; Cézanne’s “Colline des Pauvres” was acquired in 1913 through his instrumentality; he discovered in 1919 Brueghel’s “Harvesters,” at the time an unknown picture, and obtained it for the Museum. His own associates quoted Burroughs as regarding it the culmination of his own career when the Museum, on his recommendation, acquired from the Hermitage at Petrograd in 1933 the diptych of Hubert Van Eyck. To the Century he left an individual memorial in the frescoes of Greek mythology on the walls of the entrance hall, nearly all of which were his.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1935 Century Association Yearbook