Franklin Dullin Briscoe

Franklin Dullin Briscoe was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1844 and moved with his family to Philadelphia in 1848. He studied with the marine painter Edward Moran in Philadelphia and then continued his training in London and Paris. He had intended to settle permanently in France, but the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 forced him back to the United States, where he established his studio in Philadelphia.

Briscoe became known for marine and history painting. Starting in 1887, he produced a series of ten panoramic paintings depicting the Battle of Gettysburg, a mural reported to run more than two hundred feet in length, which toured venues across Pennsylvania and up and down the East Coast. The current location of those panels is not documented in available sources. He exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1863 and 1885 and at the Brooklyn Art Association in 1873. Briscoe died in Philadelphia in 1903.

Briscoe's reputation rests mainly on institutional description rather than a body of contemporaneous or modern critical commentary. Museum and reference sources consistently describe him as a marine and history painter trained in the tradition of Edward Moran, and single out the Gettysburg panorama as his most ambitious project. No exact, attributable quotation from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile.

MutualArt reports an auction price of USD 107,950 for General Custer Leading the Wolverines at Gettysburg, sold at Christie's New York in 2026, but this figure comes from a single aggregator source and the exact sale date could not be confirmed, so it should be treated as provisional rather than a fully corroborated benchmark. Briscoe's marine paintings otherwise appear periodically through regional and specialist American-art auction houses and dealers, with dealer asking prices for oil paintings generally reported in the low thousands to the mid five figures. Those are retail or consignment prices rather than confirmed hammer prices, so collectors should confirm any specific sale directly against a primary auction-house record before treating it as a benchmark.

There is no catalogue raisonne or artist foundation for Briscoe, so attribution depends on dealer connoisseurship, provenance, and documented exhibition history rather than a centralized authentication body. Because the reported auction figure of USD 107,950 rests on a single aggregator source without a confirmed sale date, any comparable sale figure a collector encounters should be checked directly against a primary auction-house record. Buyers should also confirm that a given work is attributed to Franklin Dullin Briscoe, the marine painter who lived from 1844 to 1903, since name variants and similarly named individuals appear in older biographical compilations.