William Mason Brown was born in Troy, New York, in 1828. He lived for some time in Newark, New Jersey, but in the late 1850s moved to Brooklyn, New York, where he studied with local artists and soon set up his own studio. Brown started out as a portrait painter but soon turned to landscape painting. His early landscapes include views of the Hudson River Valley in the American romantic tradition, and views around Newark, New Jersey, where he lived at that time. In the 1860s he made several sketching trips to Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Later in his career he specialized in still life painting, and one of his pictures of apples and berries was published as a lithograph by Currier and Ives in 1868. He exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York annually from 1859 to 1890, at the Brooklyn Art Association from 1865 to 1886, and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, in 1868, 1881, and 1885, and from 1887 to 1891. His painting Fruit and Art Objects was purchased by the Academy in 1889. Brown died in Brooklyn in 1898.