Brown's early works were softly painted, romantic landscapes, but in the 1860s he turned almost exclusively to still lifes. He renounced the fluid style of his earlier landscapes and began to paint carefully contrived arrangements of fruit and flowers with almost photographic clarity. Brown became one of a number of painters to gain fame through reproductions made with the new printing process of chromolithography (a multicolor lithograph in which each color is printed from a separate stone or metal plate).