Best known as a landscape painter, George Loring Brown was born in Boston and studied wood engraving with Alonzo Hartwell, subsequently working as an illustrator and studying painting with Washington Allston. Brown was stylistically linked to the Hudson River School by the time that he moved to Italy and where he lived for twenty years. During that period, Brown created dramatic landscapes eagerly sought by American tourists who brought them home, and honed his skills as a pictorial draftsman and etcher. Returning in 1860, he published nine of his etchings in a portfolio entitled Etchings of the Campagna, Rome. He died at Malden, Massachusetts.