Biography
Oliver Frank Gustave Brown OBE (1885–1966), art dealer, was born at Dulwich, London on 4 October 1885, the only son and elder child of Ernest George Brown (1851-1915), fine art dealer, and his wife, Elsie Taylor. After leaving St Paul's School in 1902, he spent six months in Tours learning French. Brown's father, who had been managing the exhibitions at the Fine Art Society, Bond Street, for some twenty-five years, was an old friend of Lawrence B. Phillips (1842-1922), inventor and artist, whose sons Wilfred and Cecil Phillips had opened the Leicester Galleries, Leicester Square, in 1902, and in 1903 Ernest Brown joined the new firm, which became Ernest Brown and Phillips.
In the autumn of 1903 Oliver Brown joined the Leicester Galleries, where he was to spend most of the rest of his life. In his father's lifetime Brown appears to have been dominated by his taste and interests. During this period the galleries displayed the Mortimer Menpes collections of the prints of James Abbott McNeil Whistler and mounted exhibitions of works by Charles Conder, J. F. Millet, William Holman Hunt, Ford Madox Brown, and the illustrators Philip William (Phil) May, (Edward) Gordon Craig, Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, and Max Beerbohm.
Brown frequently visited art schools, observing developments and enjoying social occasions, especially at the Slade. However, in 1912, rheumatic fever seriously affected his heart and caused a deafness which was to burden him for the rest of his life and which barred him from enlistment in the forces during the First World War. After a year's absence he returned to work in 1913, and became a partner in the firm in 1914 when his father became ill. His father died in 1915. During the war Brown and his partners supported many young artists, adding new names to the galleries' repertoire. Among them were Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Jacob Epstein, and three official war artists—C. R. W. Nevinson, Paul Nash, and Eric Kennington. In 1918 Brown married Monica Mary (Mona) MacCormack, daughter of Dr Charles MacCormack, medical inspector of the Prisons Board of Ireland. They had two sons and one daughter. The eldest son, Nicholas, became a director of the Leicester Galleries in 1946.
Between the wars Brown and Cecil Phillips (188-1951) mounted a series of important shows by foreign artists. These included the first one-man exhibition in England of Henri Matisse (1919), Camille Pissarro (1920), Picasso (1921), the whole of the sculpture of Degas (1923), Vincent Van Gogh (1923), Paul Gauguin (1924), Paul Cézanne (1925), P. A. Renoir (1926), and Marc Chagall (1935). They also arranged monumental displays of sculpture by Epstein, Rodin, and Henry Moore. Brown wanted to revive interest in nineteenth-century artists who had painted pictures of their own times, rather than historical pictures, and bought many paintings by James Tissot: this led to an exhibition of Tissot's work in 1933. In 1937, to mark the centenary of Queen Victoria's accession, Brown put on Victorian Life, a large exhibition of Victorian art.
Brown was interested in all the arts, except perhaps music. His main associates were painters, sculptors, and writers, and he was at his happiest in their company—at the Café Royal, the pubs and haunts they frequented, the Alhambra, the ‘old’ Empire, or in the studios of Hampstead, Chelsea, or Fitzrovia. His encouragement to newcomers was unstinting, and, however preoccupied he was, he always aimed to examine their work. He was a close friend of Walter Sickert, with whom he shared a love of music-hall, and his many other friends included William Nicholson, Paul Nash, C. R. W. Nevinson, Osbert Sitwell, Ethelbert White, Henry Moore, and Reginald Wilenski.
Brown had an obsessional interest in mounting exhibitions, often as many as three a month, and the Leicester Galleries became the chief exhibition gallery in London. His experience made him invaluable to the Arts Council in its earlier days. He was on the arts panel for two periods of three years, from January 1949 to December 1954. In 1960 he was appointed an OBE. Brown's last visits to the continent were in 1951—to Paris to acquire paintings by Sickert from the heirs of André Gide, and to Rapallo to see Sir Max Beerbohm. A comprehensive exhibition of Beerbohm's work, Max in Retrospect was mounted in 1952.
After living in London for most of his life, Brown moved to Rye in 1960, but continued to visit London several times a week. In Rye he began to write his memoirs (published in 1968 as Exhibition) which were completed shortly before his death, which occurred on 20 December 1966 in Rye Memorial Hospital. His wife survived him.