Brinley is unique among the artists of Cos Cob in that he was a resident of the area. He grew up in Riverside, just across the Mianus River from Cos Cob. His wife, Kathrine Gordon Sanger (an author of travel books and a "dramatic recitalist" whose professional name was Gordon Brinley), had spent summers with her family near the Holley House, where artists gathered.
Brinley studied at the Art Students League 1900-02 under John Twachtman, Bryson Burroughs, Kenyon Cox, H. Siddons, Mowbray, and others. His interest was in landscape painting, and he probably attended the Art Students League summer school in Cos Cob in 1902. He traveled to Europe in 1904 to complete his training, but except for one life class at the Academia di Belle Arti in Florence, he explored the galleries, museums, and churches independently. In Paris between 1905-08, he became involved with the New Society of American Artists, along with Edward Steichen, John Marin, Max Weber, and others. Although his own art was never avant-garde, Brinley helped to establish several progressive art associations in Paris and worked especially hard to find alternatives to the conservative and exclusive academic exhibition system. When he and his wife returned to New York in July 1908, Brinley spent the rest of that summer painting in Woodstock, New York, where Birge Harrison was conducting the Art Students League summer school.

In 1909 Brinley and his wife "were sighing for summer in a green world" and remembered that Charles Caffin, the art critic, had told them in Paris about the beauties of Silvermine. They rented a house "little and white, facing the sheds of a disused mill - Blanchards." Thereafter they generally spent spring, summer, and fall in Silvermine, winters in New York. The sculptor Solon Borglum was a neighbor, and Brinley joined the group called "The Knockers," which met every Sunday morning in Borglum's barn studio for frank discussions of the artists' work. The group evolved into the Silvermine Guild of Artists, which Brinley served as president in 1923. In 1913 the Brinleys built, on the Silvermine River, a Tudor-style house that they named Datchet House, after the name of the English village where a Brinley ancestor lived in 1640. The house was featured in House Beautiful, International Studio, and Arts and Decoration.
During his first summer in Silvermine, even as he became friends with Borglum, a conservative artist, Brinley became a member of Alfred Stieglitz's progressive Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue; he was included in a group exhibition at 291 in March 1910. That same month, the Madison Art Gallery, under the direction of former Cos Cob artist Henry Fitch Taylor, hung Brinley's first one-man exhibition.

Brinley was a charter member of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors and active in the preparations for the Armory Show. Though he was sympathetic to modernist trends, his own art remained Impressionist until after the Armory Show. His The Emerald Pool (cat. 97) is reminiscent of Twatchmans Hemlock Pool (cat. 145, illus. p. 23). His A Colonial Church (cat. 3, illus. p. 64) is so like any of Hassam's Church at Old Lyme paintings that even the Brinley family thought for a long time that the subject was the Congregational Church at Old Lyme. The modernist European art in the Armory show had a decided effect on Brinley's work. He intensified color, flattened forms, and tightened his compositions, although he continued the emphasis on decorative pattern, which was a major element in his later murals. Brinley was also a founding member of the Grand Central Art Galleries, a member of the Mac Dowell Club, the National Arts Club, and the National Academy of Design.
Critics generally praised Brinley's work, finding it both poetic and "thoroughly and gratefully American" because of "the beauty he finds everywhere he looks in our

Further reading:
Daniel Putnam Brinley: The Impressionist Years. Exh. Cat. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 1978.
Loder, Elizabeth M. D. Putnam Brinley: Impressionist and Mural Painter. Published for the New Canaan Historical Society and the Silvermine Guild of Artists by University Microfilms International, 1979.

Biography courtesy of Roughton Galleries, www.antiquesandfineart.com/roughton