Lillian Browse; Doyenne of the London art world known as the 'Duchess of Cork Street'.
Hyfler/Rosner
(Filed: 09/12/2005) Telegraph
Lillian Browse, who died on December 2 aged 99, was brought
up in the culturally unsophisticated milieu of South Africa
but managed by sheer charm, determination and good judgment
to establish herself as a doyenne of the London art world.
In 1945 she went into partnership with Henry Roland and
Gustav Delbanco, German emigré art historians who had begun
dealing in old masters in the 1930s. They founded Roland,
Browse and Delbanco, the Cork Street gallery, which dealt in
Old Masters but specialised in modern works in which she had
become expert. She encouraged many young British artists and
helped to revive interest in such neglected figures as
Rodin, Degas, William Nicholson, Augustus John and Walter
Sickert, of whom she wrote a biography in 1960.
Mariegold Proctor, a former secretary at the gallery, wrote
a pen portrait of her: "Miss Browse, elegant, original but
never outré in her Edwardian dress, is full of proverbial
subtlety and intuition. She has a delicacy and perfect sense
of fitness invaluable in any difficult human relations.
Though dignified and extremely fastidious in her taste, she
is never precious, and before you know her well, the timbre
of her deep unrestrained laughter is reassuring and so is
the colloquial style of her letters. Her extravagance is
only equalled by her generosity".
Lillian Browse was active in the world of art-dealing for
more than 50 years and, though the character of the
profession changed out of all recognition, she stuck
doggedly to her belief in putting quality before profit. She
started a fashion for "Christmas present" exhibitions
featuring comparatively modestly-priced pieces of work.
Customers looking for art as an investment were always
firmly informed: "We are not the stock exchange."
Lillian Gertrude Browse was born in London on April 21 1906.
Her mother had been born into an upper middle-class Jewish
family who were later appalled when she announced her
intention to marry Michael Browse, a charming but
impecunious descendant of a merchant involved in the Russian
ostrich feather trade. When Lillian was three, she and her
mother and brother sailed to join her father in
Johannesburg, where he had set himself up as a racehorse
trainer.
As a child, Lillian was a keen ballet dancer and after
leaving school worked as a ballet teacher. In 1928 she and a
colleague travelled to London to study under Margaret
Craske, the leading exponent of the Cecchetti method. She
passed the intermediate but failed the advanced exams, and
was just about to book her passage home when news arrived
from South Africa that her mother had died. She had not been
looking forward to leaving London and now felt she could not
return to a home deprived of her mother's presence. Though
in later life she reproached herself for "deserting" her
father and brother, she recognised that whatever she had
achieved stemmed from "that inglorious decision".
Lillian Browse continued with ballet classes, but soon
decided she would never make it as a professional ballerina.
She had become interested in art, and in 1931 took an unpaid
job at the Leger Gallery in Old Bond Street. Though mainly
employed in cutting and filing reproductions of paintings
from art magazines, her evident interest led to her being
rapidly promoted to gallery secretary (though she could not
type) and then manager.
Leger's specialised in old masters, but after a couple of
years, Lillian Browse got to know a circle of young artists
who opened her eyes to modern British painting. Adjacent to
her office was a large gallery which was usually empty.
Encouraged by her artist friends, and with her employers'
agreement, she began to organise exhibitions. She put on
Edward Ardizzone's inaugural show and became friends with
many other figurative artists of the period, including Jack
Yeats, William Nicholson and Stanley Spencer.
Though she read voraciously, she still felt lamentably
ignorant about art. Once, while handling the sale of a
Stanley Spencer drawing, she felt confident that she had
interpreted the message the artist wanted to convey and told
him, by way of congratulation, what she felt it was. "What a
very nice thought", the painter coolly replied. "It never
occurred to me." His words, she confessed, continued to
"echo across the distance of years".
During the early days of the war she attended the lunchtime
concerts given at the National Gallery by Dame Myra Hess.
The gallery's collection had been transferred for
safe-keeping to a hiding place in Wales. "To reach the
concert," she wrote, "one had to walk through several of the
bare rooms; without the pictures they were sad and
reproachful."
She came up with the idea that the gallery could be used for
exhibitions of works loaned by private owners and approached
its director, Sir Kenneth Clark, to ask for his approval.
Clark summarily dismissed the idea, but she refused to give
up. At the sixth time of asking, he told her to put her
ideas on paper for the trustees.
For her first exhibition, British Painting Since Whistler,
held in the spring of 1940, Lillian Browse approached Queen
Elizabeth to ask whether she would be prepared to loan items
from her own collection. The Queen's agreement helped
Lillian Browse to persuade other owners to lend their works.
The exhibition became the lead item in the papers (one
headline read "One Woman to Open National Gallery - Browse's
Academy") and it attracted more than 40,000 visitors.
Lillian Browse particularly enjoyed a visit by Dame Edith
Sitwell, who passed at full sail through the gallery,
ignoring everything, until she reached her own portrait by
Wyndham Lewis: "In front of it, she paused for a while
intently regarding herself then, mission accomplished, she
walked out of the building with eyes averted as when she
entered. So much for her proverbial interest in the arts!"
A second version was planned for the autumn, by which time
air raids had begun in earnest. The exhibition featured a
collection of 115 drawings by Augustus John which Lillian
Browse had stored in one room awaiting the day of their
hanging. One afternoon she got a hunch that, should a bomb
chance to fall on the room, the cream of John's drawings
would be lost for ever. That evening she asked gallery staff
to move the collection to the comparative safety of the
gallery's shelter. That very night the room in which they
had been stored was destroyed.
Lillian Browse organised several more exhibitions at the
gallery, including Nineteenth Century French Painting, which
drew more than 37,000 people in 30 days. In parallel, she
organised travelling exhibitions for the Council for the
Encouragement of Music and assisted at wartime auctions at
Christie's in aid of the Red Cross.
She was also involved in the dispersal of the art collection
of Sir Hugh Walpole, who died in 1941, cataloguing three
separate shows held at the Leicester Galleries in 1945. The
top price paid, she recalled, was 1,800 guineas for an
attractive medium-sized oil painting by Renoir. Works by
Braque, Klee and Picasso fetched between 100 and 500 guineas
apiece. By the time all 900 pictures had been sold, the
Walpole estate had received just under £27,000. "It is no
wonder that I now find it difficult to think of a picture in
terms of millions," she wrote later.
The success of Lillian Browse's wartime exhibitions and her
growing expertise in her subject (during the war she
published a study of the Augustus John drawings, the first
of two books on Walter Sickert, and was commissioned to
write a book on Degas, published as Degas Dancers in 1949)
enhanced her reputation in the art world; and in 1945 she
began her partnership with Roland and Delbanco at 19 Cork
Street, Mayfair.
William Nicholson was one of the first contemporary painters
to join the gallery and Lillian published a catalogue
raisonné of his work in 1955. She discovered that one of his
habits was collecting truant hairpins which he picked up
from the pavement and which he would then use when he felt
that a picture needed "improvement", leaving visible
scratches. As a result she never let him see his pictures
alone.
Nicholson died in 1949 and Lillian Browse was surprised
when, several years later, she received a letter from his
devoted and long-term mistress, Marguerite, who had been
shunned by his family and was living in poverty, begging her
to do something about his grave, which lay unmarked in a
Newark churchyard. At her request Lillian Browse wrote to
old friends with an appeal for subscriptions, and in 1962 a
simple headstone was erected.
But she never forgave William's son, the artist Ben
Nicholson, for refusing to contribute even a modest £10. His
excuse, expressed in a letter, was that his father's works
would stand as a memorial. This was true, she conceded, "but
his attitude was haughty, with no thought for others".
Feeling instinctively that his letter was meant for
posterity, she tore it into pieces.
In the 1970s Lillian Browse began to feel that the gallery
should take on one or two young people with a view to
handing on responsibility to a new generation. At first her
partners appeared to agree with her, but in practice they
were unhappy with the young people who approached them. As a
result of this disagreement, the partnership broke up and
she formed a new one with William Darby, who owned a small
gallery near Sotheby's, opening as Browse and Darby at the
same premises in Cork Street in 1977.
Away from the gallery, Lillian Browse organised the Sickert
centenary exhibition at the Tate in 1960, and in 1983 gave
the greater part of her own collection of late 19th and
early 20th-century paintings, drawings and sculpture to the
Courtauld Institute. These included drawings by Modigliani
and Henry Moore and a group of bronzes by Rodin. She worked
as The Spectator's ballet critic for four years in the early
1950s and was appointed CBE in 1998.
It was Lillian Browse's neighbour Rex Nan Kivell, the
founder of the Redfern Galley, who christened her the
"Duchess of Cork Street", and she chose the title for her
autobiography, published in 1999.
Lillian Browse married first, in 1934, Ivan Joseph, but the
marriage soon broke down. She married secondly, in 1964,
Sidney Lines, who predeceased her.