As a child in Newark, New Jersey, Browne lived next door to the artist Thomas Moran famous for his landscapes and particularly for his large paintings of Yellowstone National Park.

He encouraged her to take additional art lessons, and by age 12 one of her paintings of flowers was accepted into an exhibition at the National Academy of Design in New York.

Browne studied under a series of accomplished tutors — Eleanor and Kate Greatorex (1854–1917, 1851–1913), Frederick Freer (1849–1908), Charles Melville Dewey (1849–1937), Julien Dupré (1851–1910) in Barbizon, and Henry Bisbing (1849–1933) in the Netherlands.

She was also the only woman to be included in The Fox Chase mural about the art colony that Henry Rankin Poore was painting over the dining room fireplace.

These were extraordinary honors, since this all-male colony generally looked down on female artists – as most obviously illustrated by Willard Metcalf who painted one young woman art student unsympathetically as Poor Little Bloticelli (1907).