Alden Finney Brooks was an American artist well-respected in the Chicago art scene of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He worked primarily in oil paint and watercolors. Brooks and his wife Ellen raised an artistically inclined family near Hyde Park, Chicago. Their eldest daughter, Elizabeth Brooks Maher, was a watercolor painter married to Prairie School architect, and local legend, George W. Maher. Alden Finney Brooks spent his remaining years on the North Shore, where two of his daughters lived.