Biography:

Joseph Goldsborough Bruff, who customarily signed himself J. Goldsborough Bruff, was a topographical and architectural draftsman and "designing artist" in United States Government service for almost sixty of his nearly eighty-five years. He was an inventive, imaginative, and a creative decorative artist, talents amply demonstrated by many of his surviving works. Bruff, whose family name may originally have been spelled "Brough," was a man of wide-ranging intellectual interests, as attested to by the varied contents of his library of 322 volumes embracing history, travel, the fine arts, religion, philosophy, literature and scientific works. He did not read any foreign language.