Charles Browning’s oil paintings are steeped in 17th- and 18th-century Dutch still lifes and floral painting—he was especially influenced by Jan van Huysum and Albert Mignon—but his allegorical narratives are set in colonial America. Browning alludes to frontier mythology, frequently commenting on excess and consumption. A painting within a painting, Browning’s well known The Big Picture (2011) depicts a man holding a paintbrush peering out from behind a canvas, whose dramatic imagery depicts a scene of Native Americans watching a group of colonists dump a cornucopia of produce into a river; overhead, a heraldic Biblical scene unfolds.
