Frederick Brown (1851-1941)

Aliases: Fred Brown; Frederick (1851) Brown

Professions: Painter

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  FREDERICK BROWN 1851-1941

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  A RED-, YELLOW- AND GREEN-PAINTED PINE HANGING CUPBOARD, ATTRIBUTED TO JOHANNES BRAUN OR SAMUEL SWINEHART, MAHANTONGO VALLEY, PENNSYLVANIA CIRCA 1825

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  Frederick Brown, 1851-1941 , teatime

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  Frederick Brown , 1851 - 1941 peasant fare oil on canvas

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Frederick Brown Biography

(b Chelmsford, Essex, 14 March 1851; d Richmond, Surrey, 8 Jan 1941). English teacher and painter. From 1868 to 1877 he studied at the National Art Training School, London (later the Royal College of Art), where he grew to detest the inept, mechanical teaching methods then prevalent in Britain. As headmaster of the Westminster School of Art (1877–92), Brown, inspired by Alphonse Legros’s reforms at the Slade School, taught his students basic observational and analytical skills while encouraging them to develop individual styles. In 1883 he studied at the Académie Julian, Paris; his work for several years thereafter, notably Hard Times (1886; Liverpool, Walker A.G.) and Marketing (1887; Manchester, C.A.G.), shows the influence of the French realist Jules Bastien-Lepage. Shortly before 1890 Brown took up portraiture in a style strongly influenced by Whistler; he was also drawn to Impressionist landscape painting by his friend Philip Wilson Steer, whose influence is noticeable in the Horse-shoe Bend of the Severn (1909; Dublin, Hugh Lane Mun. Gal.). A founder of the New English Art Club in 1886 and author of its constitution, he belonged to the ‘Impressionist clique’ that won control of the club in the early 1890s. As Slade Professor of Art (1893–1918), he consolidated and expanded Legros’s reforms and ensured the school’s progressive character by appointing Steer and Henry Tonks to teaching positions early in his tenure. Among the artists who benefited from his liberal and enlightened instruction were Tonks and Beardsley at the Westminster School, and Augustus John, William Orpen and Wyndham Lewis at the Slade. Brown’s ‘Recollections’ are published in the journal Artwork (vi, 1930, pp. 149–60, 269–78).

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