Maurice Braun · 1877–1941

Maurice Braun: a biography

A New York-trained portrait painter who moved west in 1909, Maurice Braun became San Diego's best-known early painter, and one of the leading California Impressionists.

From Hungary to New York

Braun was born on October 1, 1877, in Nagy Bittse, in the Kingdom of Hungary (today in Slovakia). His family brought him to the United States when he was four and settled in New York City. As a boy he copied works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At fourteen he was apprenticed to a jeweler, but he soon left to study art.

From 1897 to 1900 he studied at the National Academy of Design under Francis C. Jones, George W. Maynard and Edgar M. Ward, then spent a year with William Merritt Chase. In 1902–03 he travelled in Europe, to Berlin, Vienna and Hungary, to study the old masters. Back in New York he built a reputation as a figure and portrait painter.

San Diego and Point Loma

Drawn to landscape, and to the Theosophical Society, which had established its international headquarters at Point Loma under Katherine Tingley, Braun left New York for San Diego in 1909. Tingley encouraged him to keep working as a professional artist rather than join the community, but he remained an active Theosophist for the rest of his life and later built a studio home on Point Loma.

He founded a fine arts academy in San Diego, which opened in 1912 in the Isis Theater building and is usually called the San Diego Academy of Art. Among his first students was Alfred R. Mitchell. Braun was a founding officer of the San Diego Art Guild in 1915.

National recognition

Braun sent his Southern California landscapes east almost at once. He exhibited at the National Academy of Design from 1910, and in the following years at the Carnegie Institute, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In 1915 he had a solo exhibition at the Milch Gallery in New York, and he won a gold medal at the Panama-California Exposition in San Diego. He was represented by the Kanst Art Gallery in Los Angeles and by Macbeth Gallery in New York, and in 1919 he exhibited with the Ten Painters Club in Los Angeles, alongside Edgar Payne, Guy Rose, Benjamin Brown and others.

The San Diego backcountry gave him his main subjects: rolling hills of dry grass, blue mountain ranges, sycamores and especially eucalyptus. In 1918 he painted in Yosemite on commission. In January 1919 he married Hazel Boyer.

East and West

In 1921 Braun left San Diego for several years in the East, painting in the Rocky Mountains on the way. He worked in New York, then at Silvermine and Old Lyme, Connecticut, and exhibited with the Lyme Art Association in 1923. He returned to San Diego in 1924 and moved into a new Point Loma house designed by Richard Requa, but for the next five years spent part of each year in Connecticut. He also painted in Texas in the mid-1920s, and in 1929 won a prize at the Witte Museum in San Antonio for Texas Fields.

In 1929 he was a founder of the Contemporary Artists of San Diego, with Alfred Mitchell, Charles Reiffel, Charles Fries, Leon Bonnet, Elliot Torrey and others.

Later years

Sales slowed in the Depression, and Braun returned to teaching. His later work includes more still lifes, influenced by his interest in Asian art and philosophy. In 1937 he headed the art department of the Theosophical University. On November 7, 1941, after he and his wife spoke to a women's club in Chula Vista, he suffered a heart attack and died that evening in San Diego. He had just returned from a painting trip in the Julian hills.

Legacy and collections

The Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego held a memorial exhibition in 1951, and a retrospective followed in San Francisco in 1954. Braun's paintings are in the San Diego Museum of Art, the Laguna Art Museum, the Irvine Museum collection, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the San Diego History Center, among others.

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Sources

Original text prepared for this site. Facts were cross-checked across the sources below. Sources differ on when the San Diego academy was founded (1910 or 1912); the 1912 date is the opening reported in the San Diego press at the time.

1. Martin E. Petersen, "Maurice Braun: Master Painter of the California Landscape," The Journal of San Diego History 23, no. 3 (Summer 1977). sandiegohistory.org.
2. San Diego History Center, "The Artist Maurice Braun," The Journal of San Diego History (July 2001). sandiegohistory.org.
3. U.S. Department of State, Art in Embassies, "Maurice Braun." art.state.gov.
4. Laguna Art Museum, "Maurice Braun." lagunaartmuseum.org.
5. Wikipedia, "Maurice Braun." en.wikipedia.org (accessed October 2026).