Bryson Burroughs grew up and received his first art instruction in Cincinnati, Ohio, where his mother had moved after the death of his father. As a child, he attended public school and studied drawing at the Cincinnati Art Museum. In 1889, after working as a cartoonist for a Cincinnati newspaper, he moved to New York, where he studied at the Art Students League under Kenyon Cox and H. Siddons Mowbray.
Burroughs won the League's Chanler Scholarship in 1890 which provided for five years of study abroad. In Paris, he enrolled at the Acad‚mie Julian and the Ecole des Beaux Arts. His teachers included Gabriel Ferrier, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, and Luc-Olivier Merson. Of the three, Merson was the most influential, however several critiques which Burroughs received from another mural painter, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, proved to be of more lasting value. Previously, Burroughs had admired the brightly colored detail of the English Pre-Raphaelite painters. The exposure to Puvis de Chavannes awakened a new appreciation for cool, subdued colors and calm, simply conceived figures.
After a trip to Italy in 1895, Burroughs and his wife of two years, sculptor Edith Woodman Burroughs, returned to the United States. The two had met as students at the Art Students League, and Burroughs soon began teaching at that institution. He also gave instruction at the Cooper Union School and the Norwich Academy Summer School in Connecticut.
In 1906, realizing that it was too difficult to support his young family with his painting, Burroughs took a part-time curatorial post at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He was hired to assist Curator Roger Fry, but within a year he had replaced the Englishman as head of the paintings department. Burroughs remained at the Metropolitan until 1934, splitting his days between morning work in his studio and afternoon curatorial duties at the museum. In 1926, ten years after the death of Edith Burroughs, he married a member of the paintings department staff, Louise Guerber.
Although it sometimes required great effort to convince reluctant trustees, he managed to make important and forward-looking acquisitions for the museum, including the first C‚zanne in an American public collection. He defended current European trends such as cubism and fauvism while simultaneously championing American artists like John Singleton Copley, Thomas Eakins, and Albert P. Ryder.
Among artists, he had a reputation for tolerance. Elected to the Society of American Artists in 1901, he served on its juries as an advocate for art far more progressive than his own classical compositions. He gained some renown in 1914 when he had a one-man show at the Galeries Levesque in Paris. One painting from the show was purchased by the French government. In the United States, his private commissions included fresco murals for the entrance hall of the Century Association and decorations for the Harry Harkness Flagler residence. Retrospective exhibitions of his work occurred in 1933 at the Century Association and in the year following his death at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
