Frances Chamberlin Brand’s The China Painter is an important Boston genre showing a young woman painting/decorating pieces of china in the Fenway Studio building at 30 Ipswich Street, Boston. During the late 1920’s and early 1930’s Frances Chamberlin Brand had a studio in that building. At that time, Paxton, Joseph DeCamp and Edmund C. Tarbell had Fenway studios.

Frances Chamberlin Brand was born in Boston in 1887 and died in Brookline, MA in 1980. She earned a good living painting portraits of famous people and still life subjects in and around Boston and was exceedingly popular.  She trained at the Mass College of Art and took private art lessons from William M. Paxton and Edmund C. Tarbell.  During her late thirties, she went to Vermont to direct the Vermont schools’ art programs, but moved back to Boston and opened her second art studio on Boylston Street, where she gained renown as a professional portrait painter. 

Brand’s work hangs in the Peabody Essex Museum, the Montpelier, Vermont government buildings, Sieblin Museum of Ohio, Weymouth, MA town hall and in many prestigious private collections.

Brand’s The China Painter was highly influenced by the interior genre paintings of William M. Paxton and Edmund C. Tarbell and because her work follows Tarbell’s  techniques and general handling, she is known as a “Tarbellite” or follower of Tarbell.