| Description | This collection includes the following items: twelve sketchbooks by Dorothy Brown containing pencil, crayon and watercolour studies, early 20th century; prospectus for Crystal Palace Company's School of Art, Music and Literature, 1904; silver medal for modelling from life, Jul 1903; photograph of ? Dorothy Brown [taken by Stuart Black, photographer of Torquay], undated [? 1920s]; note and newscutting relating to SWA Exhibition 1904; three photographs of a Nativity scene, undated [20th century]; mounted photograph of painting by Dorothy Brown, 1903. |
| AdminHistory | Dorothy Langford Brown (nee Reed) (c 1883-1940s), artist, was the daughter of Herbert Reed, a London barrister and solicitor, and his wife Maud. Dorothy grew up in Upper Norwood, where she kept a house after her marriage. She trained in art at Crystal Palace Company's School for Art, Music and Literature during the early 1900s: this School was established as the Crystal Palace School of Art, Science and Literature in 1859, and was initially situated in the North Nave before moving to the South Wing in c 1901. It seems to have closed at some point before the First World War: as the archives of the Crystal Palace Company were destroyed in the fire of 1936, it is difficult to establish a fixed date of the closure. The Company also ran a School of Practical Engineering in the South Tower of the Crystal Palace site, as well as a School of Gardening. She also apparently trained at the Slade School of Art (1906-1908), and allegedly exhibited at the Royal Academy. She also exhibited at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, and the New Gallery.
At the age of twenty (c 1903), Dorothy married into the Langford Browns, a well-established Devon family who had been resident on the manorial estate of Barton Hall, Kingskerswell since 1710. She is possibly listed as Dorothy Brown on the 1901 census as resident at Kingskerswell, aged 27. Barton Hall had been built by Henry Langford Brown in the Tudor style in c 1840. (The estate was inherited by Thomas Hercules Brown in 1936, on whom the estate was entailed as the nearest male relative, and was subsequently developed during the 1950s as a holiday village by Sir Fred Pontin, becoming the home of the first artificial ski slope in the UK in 1963. The site was sold in 1999 and now is an activities centre for children). Dorothy's husband Hercules Langford Brown (1866-1936) was educated at Winchester and Exeter College, Oxford, buying a commission in the Seaforth Highlanders Militia from which he resigned after 25 years. He then assumed an important role in the local community, becoming a Justice of the Peace, parish and district councillor, poor law guardian and squire (from 1920). Unable to have children, the Browns adopted the folklorist Theo Brown (1914-1993) at the age of two, and encouraged her in developing interests in botany and art. |