George Browne was born in New York City on 10 January 1918, the son of artist Belmore Browne (qv). As a boy in Tacoma, WA, and Banff, Alberta, Canada, he showed a strong interest in painting and drawing and none whatsoever in school; according to family members, his poor academic performance may have been exacerbated by dyslexia. In his early years, Browne, like his father, lost the sight in one eye as the result of a gun accident. His father permitted him to quit school after the eight grade, when the younger Browne was thirteen or fourteen, determined that if the boy wanted to paint, he should make a thorough job of it, the elder Browne ensured that his son spent eight hours a day, six days a week working hard at his art. His free time was filled with hiking trips, shooting expeditions, and related outdoor activities. By this time the family had moved from Banff to Marin County, CA, and when he was fifteen, he began studying at the California School of Fine Arts. He continued to work with his father throughout this period; after graduating at the age of nineteen, he served as his father's apprentice on the diorama backgrounds at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. During the Second World War he made several attempts to enlist in the Army; Browne's lack of sight in his left eye rendering him unfit for combat. After finally getting into the service, rather ironically by being drafted, he transferred to the Army Air Corps, where he served as a tester of parachutes and other safety equipment. He pioneered the high-altitude, low opening parachute jump, being the first person to survive a parachute jump from above 40,000 feet. Browne left the armed forces in January of 1946. Other than collaborating with his father on several dioramas for the North American Hall of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City before and during the War, he had not yet done any painting in a professional capacity, and he determined to do so now. He painted in California and in Alberta, Canada, for a year. In 1947 he was asked to join an expedition sponsored by the Boston (MA) Academy of Science to climb Denali (Mt. McKinley) in Alaska as an official artist; the artistic results of the climb, done in June of 1947, were twenty sketches and three or four commissioned paintings. In the late 1940s he established a reputation as a painter of game birds, executing such pictures as Startled Mallards and Canvasbacks Swinging the Channel: Chesapeake Bay (both now in a private collection in Arizona). In 1950 he had his first one-man show, at a prominent gallery in New York City; he made connections with other galleries in the following years. In 1954 he moved from California to Connecticut in order to be closer to galleries in New York City and Boston and to upland game and waterfowl habitats of the Mid-Atlantic states and New England. During a target-shooting game in the Adirondacks of New York on 15 March 1958 Browne was shot and killed by an inexperienced shooter attempting to clear a jammed pistol. The famous wildlife painter Francis Lee Jaques is quoted in a 1993 Sporting Classics article on Browne, " I fear I was a little jealous of George Browne's work, as I don't believe I was of any other artist. His work was a breakthrough." One of Browne's greatest strengths was his ability to integrate fully developed wildlife images, especially birds, in a convincing way into fully realized natural settings.