Stephen P. Brown, professor of painting at the Hartford Art School and a highly regarded artist known for his powerful, realistic portraits, died on Oct. 21 after a long battle with cancer. He was 59.

Brown began teaching at the Hartford Art School in 1987, and rose to the level of full professor. He was one of the most highly respected and beloved faculty members at the school, and his classes were always in high demand, said Associate Professor of Ceramics Walter Hall, one of Brown’s closest friends. Even though Brown had cut back on his teaching in recent years due to illness, students were still clamoring to sign up for his classes because of what they had heard about him, Hall said.

Though Brown was a realist painter, he approached his teaching from a much broader perspective. Said one former student, “Stephen is not concerned with whether a painting is abstract or representational. His lessons on color and composition are applicable to both. He teaches students to use their hands and their brains.”

Members of the University community who have attended the annual Hartford Art School Faculty Exhibition may remember some of Brown’s paintings for their tremendous emotional impact. At one of the faculty exhibitions, for example, Brown showed several intensely moving paintings and drawings of his dying father lying in a hospital bed. The final portrait in the series shows Brown's father just after death, free of the tubes and wires that had covered him before.

Among Brown’s many other evocative works was a portrait of a friend of his who had undergone a mastectomy for treatment of breast cancer. In the painting, she is nude from the waist up. “It is the portrait of a woman struggling to come to terms with the loss of a breast, her sexuality, her femininity, and beauty,” Brown said at the time.

Brown was represented by the Forum Gallery in New York, a leader in the field of modern and contemporary figurative art, and considered by many to be the premier realist gallery in the country. His paintings are in the collections of the Hofstra Museum in Hempstead, N.Y.; the Albany Museum in Albany, Ga.; the New Britain Museum of American Art and the Mattatuck Museum in Connecticut; the George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum in Springfield, Mass.; the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky; and the National Academy of Design in New York.

The 1994 winner of the Academy Award in Art at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Brown was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1999. There, he was awarded the Benjamin Altman Award for landscape in 1994 and the Gladys Emerson Cook Prize in 2001. Brown was a Fellow at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and a resident at Millay Colony for the Arts in Austerlitz, N.Y.

Brown, who grew up in Colorado, received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Colorado State University and a Master of Fine Arts from Brooklyn College in New York. He studied with the major figurative painters Lennart Anderson and Philip Pearlstein at Brooklyn College, and he was a studio assistant to the painter Alice Neel. Brown also studied in Vienna, Austria, and at the Skowhegan School of Painting in Maine.

Read Brown’s obituary in the Hartford Courant, and leave online condolences.