Franklin D. Briscoe is best known for his masterful renderings of marine views. He established a successful painting career and was highly regarded as a competent marine painter during his lifetime. He was a versatile artist whose work included history painting and portraiture as well as seascapes.

Briscoe was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1844. At the age of four his family moved to Philadelphia, where Briscoe he trained with eminent marine artist Edmond Moran (1860) (brother of famed Hudson River Artist Thomas Moran), and in Europe. Like many of his contemporaries, he went abroad to further his artistic education, studying the masters, visiting London and Paris before returning home and establishing his studio in Philadelphia. By the age of 25 was considered a proficient landscape and marine painter.

 Briscoe made several more ocean voyages during his career, experiences that inspired the dramatic seascapes and shipping scenes for which he is today best known. The weather was an especially important factor in his work, whether capturing fishermen returning after a long day’s work under calm, luminist skies, to his paintings of storm-tossed ships and sailors at the mercy of the wind and waves.

 In 1885, he painted an historical mural that was in ten panels, a total of 230 feet long, and 13 feet tall, “The Battle of Gettysburg.” A depiction of the sequences of the battle, it was exhibited throughout the country, and is now housed in the archives of the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana.

 Briscoe exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Brooklyn Art Association. His paintings are included in the Collections of The Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington), the Woodmere Art Museum (Philadelphia, PA), The Redding, Pennsylvania Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Art (Indiana), and the Butler Institute of American Art (Ohio).

 He remained in Philadelphia throughout his life and died there in 1903.