Rawdon Brown

Artist Info

Rawdon BrownLondon, 1806 - 1883, Venice

http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/nr2003015766

Brown, Rawdon Lubbock (1806–1883), historian and antiquary, was born in London, the son of Hugh William Brown and Anne Elizabeth Lubbock, sister of Sir John Lubbock, bt. He was a boarder at Charterhouse School, 1820–21, and appears to have studied at Oxford; but the record is uncertain until his arrival in Venice in 1833, on a whimsical mission to find the grave of Thomas Mowbray, the ‘banish'd Norfolk’ of Shakespeare's Richard II. He made his home in Venice, where he bought the Palazzo Dario in 1838 for £480. Financial problems, apparently connected with an estrangement from his family, caused him to sell the palazzo in 1842, and move into an apartment—first in the Palazzo Businello, and then, in 1852, in the Palazzo Gussoni-Grimani della Vida. His attachment to the city was profound. ‘I never wake in the morning,’ he told Charles Eliot Norton, ‘but I thank God that he has let me pass my days in Venice.’ Browning wrote a sonnet about the legendary occasion when Brown was about to leave on a trip to England, took a last look at the Grand Canal from his window, and decided that he could not tear himself away (‘Sonnet to Rawdon Brown’, 1883).

Brown never married, and he acquired a reputation for misanthropy and cantankerousness; yet he acted as host and cicerone to a crowd of eminent visitors—to Ruskin most notably, whom he assisted in the researches for The Stones of Venice. During the difficult period preceding the annulment of the Ruskins' marriage, Brown's sympathies were firmly with Effie; but subsequently the breach with John was healed. He acquired a unique knowledge of the history and antiquities of Venice, and spent most of his life in studying its archives. After publishing some original investigations into the life and works of the Venetian historian Marino Sanuto the younger, Ragguagli sulla vita e sulle opere di Marino Sanuto (1837), he discovered and edited contemporary copies (the originals had been destroyed) of the dispatches of Sebastian Giustinian, the Venetian ambassador in London at the beginning of the reign of Henry VIII; these were published in 1854 under the title Four Years at the Court of Henry VIII. The new light which this book threw on the relation of the Venetian archives to English history induced Lord Palmerston, at the instance of Sir Henry Layard, to commission Brown in 1862 to calendar those Venetian state papers which dealt with English history. This work engaged all Brown's attention for the rest of his life. He published five volumes of the Calendar of state papers and manuscripts relating to English affairs existing in the archives and collections of Venice, and in other libraries of northern Italy (1864–81), and a sixth was completed and published in the year after his death by his executor G. Cavendish-Bentinck.

Brown bequeathed to the Public Record Office the 126 volumes of his transcripts from the Venetian archives, dating from early times to 1797. Among his other works is Avviso di Londra, an account of newsletters sent from London to Venice during the first half of the seventeenth century, published in volume 4 of the Philobiblon Society's Bibliographical and Historical Miscellanies (1854). Brown died on 25 August 1883 at Casa della Vida in Venice; he had hoped to be buried in the old protestant cemetery of San Nicolò, on the Lido, where he had bought a plot and prepared a grave. But the authorities withheld permission, and he was interred in the protestant section of the cemetery island of San Michele.

Sidney Lee, rev. John Pemble

Sources

Effie in Venice: unpublished letters of Mrs John Ruskin written from Venice between 1849–1852, ed. M. Lutyens (1965) · P. Kaufman, ‘Rawdon Brown and his adventures in Venetian archives’, English Miscellany, 18 (1967), 283–302 · P. Kaufman, ‘John Ruskin and Rawdon Brown: the unpublished correspondence of an Anglo-Venetian friendship’, North American Review, 222 (1925–6), 112–20, 311–20 · D. Sutton, ‘Two historians in Venice’, Apollo, 110 (1979), 364–73 · The Times (29 Aug 1883) · The Times (8 Sept 1883) · The Athenaeum (8 Sept 1883), 307