Portrait of an artist as a young man

Butler Brown looks the painting he did for my grandmother in 1968, when he
was just starting out.

Artist Butler Brown had a reunion with one of his earliest paintings Sunday afternoon.

It was sweet. I should know. It belongs to me.

My family has a long history with Butler, going back to Hawkinsville in the 1960s. My late maternal grandparents – Mr and Mrs. W.E. Richards – taught school there from 1948-73.

My grandmother was a second-grade teacher and, in 1968, had Butler’s son, Tony, in her class.
That was the same year Butler was taking an art correspondence course. He called my grandmother one day and asked if he could come take some photographs of a lake at their house. He went over there with his camera.

He then went to work, painting the lake, trees and sky. If you’re familiar with his work, it’s unlike most of his landscapes. The blues and greens are bright and bold.

In the portrait is a little boy fishing at the end of a dock. It is supposed to be Tony, his son, but my mother says it could very well be me. I caught my first fish at that lake. If I close my eyes, I can still feel it tugging on the end of my cane pole.

Butler gave the painting to my grandmother and, before she died, she gave it to me. It always hung over her mantel. It is truly a family treasure.

Of course, eight years after he painted that and others, he became famous when Jimmy Carter hung his paintings at the White House.

I believe he may be the most famous artist the state of Georgia has ever produced. He still has his studio outside of Hawkinsville.

Since I was with Butler most of the weekend at the Forsythia Festival, I promised to bring the painting to show him. I had told him about it many times in the past, but he had not seen it in almost 40 years.

It was a beautiful reunion. Kind of like showing Hemingway the first paragraph he ever wrote.