Thomas Brownell Eldred, painter and printmaker, was born in Climax, Michigan on February 19, 1903. He studied economics at Kalamazoo College (because there was no art program at the time) and graduated in 1926. He then enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he studied with John Norton. Several years later, after serving in the Merchant Marines, he hitchhiked to New York where he attended the Art Students League, studying with Thomas Hart Benton and Guy Pene DuBois.

Between the 1933 and 1938, Eldred taught at the Brooklyn Museum of Art under the WPA Art Program. In Brooklyn, Eldred met Werner Drewes, one of the founding members of the American Abstract Artists group. During these years, the Guggenheims acquired his work for their new Museum of Non-Objective Art (now the Guggenheim Museum). Eldred worked at Stanley William Hayter's influential workshop Atelier 17 in New York and later in Paris.

Eldred's work was included in exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, the Virginia Museum of Art in Richmond, and the Edward Hopper House Foundation in Nyack, New York. His work is included in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Guggenheim Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Thomas Brownell Eldred died in Polk, Pennsylvania on May 21, 1993.