![]() In 1912 it moved into a wing of the new Victoria Memorial Museum, and Brown helped draft the National Gallery of Canada Act, which made it an independent institution in June of the following year. Years later, Brown would tell the story that, not long after he became curator, a small boy asked him, “Say, Mister, where’s the whale?” The gallery had no national profile, a small staff, a minuscule budget, and an unremarkable collection. Theirs was a devoted personal and professional alliance, based on shared religious faith (Maud was also a committed Christian Scientist), interests, and values.īrown took over a 30-year-old gallery that was located in a federal-government building devoted to fisheries and administered by the Department of Public Works. (The part-time curators who preceded him, John William Hurrell Watts* and Lawrence Fennings Taylor, had been architects in the Department of Public Works.) Financial stability enabled Brown to marry Maud, who was teaching in Toronto. He arranged for Brown’s September appointment as the institution’s first full-time curator, one of the very few salaried arts posts in Canada. In June 1910 Walker became chair of the Advisory Arts Council, which oversaw the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. In Maud’s words, Heaton’s intervention was “an answer to prayer.” On his arrival in Canada shortly thereafter, Brown worked initially in Montreal, taking care of an exhibit of British paintings on loan, and then went to the Art Museum of Toronto, where he was in regular contact with banker and collector Byron Edmund Walker*. While in Lincolnshire he became engaged to Maud Sturton, who had been educated at the women-only Newnham College (officially affiliated with the University of Cambridge in 1948), despite her family’s objections about his apparently dismal career prospects.Īround 1909 Arnesby introduced Eric to Montreal art dealer Frank Robert Heaton, who convinced him that an ambitious Englishman could thrive in Canada’s inchoate arts community. Forgoing university, Eric trained as an artist with his elder brother, the landscape painter Arnesby Brown grew cotton with a cousin on the island of Nevis in the West Indies and farmed in Lincolnshire. Both reading and Christian Science would be lifelong passions, the latter helping to shape his conviction that art needed to be morally improving. A sports injury interrupted his education at Nottingham High School by requiring a prolonged convalescence, during which he read voraciously and converted to Christian Science. 1910 Florence Maud Sturton in Toronto they had no children d. 6 April 1939 in Ottawa.Įric Brown’s father was a Nottingham city councillor his mother died when he was four. Source: Library and Archives Canada/MIKAN 3560256īROWN, ERIC, office holder, arts administrator, author, lecturer, and farmer b. August 1877 in Nottingham, England, one of the nine children of John Henry Brown and Emma Wardle m. 25 Dec. ![]()
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