Skip to main content
The Brown Sisters, Cambridge, Massachusetts (from the series The Brown Sisters)
The Brown Sisters, Cambridge, Massachusetts (from the series The Brown Sisters)
The Brown Sisters, Cambridge, Massachusetts (from the series The Brown Sisters)

The Brown Sisters, Cambridge, Massachusetts (from the series The Brown Sisters)

Artist (American, born 1947)
Date1986
Mediumgelatin silver print
DimensionsImage: 7 5/8 × 9 5/8 in. (19.4 × 24.4 cm)
Support: 8 × 9 7/8 in. (20.3 × 25.1 cm)
Mat: 14 × 17 in. (35.6 × 43.2 cm)
ClassificationsPhotograph
Credit LineGift of the Roberta Coke DeGolyer Estate, 1995
Object number1995.33.27o
DescriptionA bust length portrait of a group of four sisters. The women are in their mid-twenties and early thirties. The youngest woman, second from the left is wearing a white blouse with a large lace collar, next to her is the oldest woman in the group and she is wearing a solid black shirt with three buttons down the front. The woman on the far right is wearing a cable knit sweater and collared shirt underneath.
Text Entries
Nicholas Nixon married his wife Beverly Brown, known as Bebe, in 1971 and first photographed her with her three sisters at a family gathering in August of 1974. He discarded that portrait but in July of 1975 he tried again and kept the negative, which became the beginning image in his annual series The Brown Sisters. The sisters appear in the same order in each of the pictures, from left to right: Heather, Mimi, Bebe, and Laurie. The sisters jointly select which of Nixon’s exposures will be chosen to represent each year. The portraits are made with black-and-white film in an eight-by-ten-inch view camera on a tripod and the prints were made as contact prints for about the first twenty-five years, after which the artist also began producing the portraits as twenty-by-twenty-four-inch enlargement prints.
On View
Not on view