Remembrances of Anne S. K. Brown
The Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection is an extraordinary resource — perhaps particularly unknown in relation to its significance — and reflects the lifelong passion and knowledge of an extraordinary person. That person was my mother. My brother, Nicholas Brown, who served on the board of the collection for Brown University and spent 25 years in the military, and my sister, Angela Brown Fischer, who has been the informal curator of all Brown family collections, are both better qualified than I on this subject. However, perhaps because I am professionally involved in exhibitions, it has fallen to me to submit these remembrances of things past.
The collection started, actually, when my mother was a little girl. She remembered the moment in exact detail. It was in March, 1915, when she was nine, in the flush of all the news of World War I, that she walked by the window of Schwarz’s toy store in Baltimore and saw there the Wonder Book of Soldiers. She hoped that her father, rector of old St. Paul’s in Baltimore, would again invite the Rev. Mr. Garth, rector of St. Mark’s Church, Islip, Long Island to preach in Lent, and that his appearance would coincide with March 25, which was her birthday. She hoped that, if so, he would take her for a walk after lunch, and they would pass by Schwarz, and he would ask if she would choose a birthday present. All of this came to pass, and, in lieu of any doll or toy she might have had, the coveted book was hers. It remains in the Anne S. K. Brown Library at Brown.
She soon had memorized the uniform of all ranks in the British Army of 1912. Being only ten months different in age from her younger brother, Herbert Kinsolving, the two children developed a very close bond, and started, as their meager allowances would allow, collecting and playing with toy soldiers.
She had a lifelong passion for history, and her collection became its focus. When she married John Nicholas Brown in 1930, she went on an extended honeymoon, and used the opportunity of traveling to Europe for the first time in her life to haunt the little network of lead soldier dealers in Great Britain and on the continent. The collection of lead soldiers continued to grow, and her taste for the art deco of the day, by picking out the eighteenth-century moldings in black and silver and housing the growing parade of soldiers of all periods in black and silver cases specially designed for the purpose by my father. John Nicholas Brown kept a drawing board in his study, and had a lifelong interest in architecture and design; he was delighted to be called upon to design these special cases, whose back walls were mirrors, to double the apparent numbers of every regiment. The collection grew to begin with the cave man, go through knights in armor — whose heraldic banners were historically accurate, and whose helmets were removable to reveal portrait faces — and end right up to date, with World War II. It got to the point where, if a missing uniform was not commercially available on a lead soldier we were all put to work casting new soldiers at home. The proper colors, under my mother’s watchful tutelage, were then custom-applied by my grandmother Brown, who had studied painting in Paris at the end of the last century and kept an active studio at Harbour Court, her Newport House. I remember “borrowing” some of the toy artillery, which actually fired match-sticks, and anti-aircraft search lights, which ran on flashlight batteries, until a stop was put to this non-scholarly use of the collection.
A stop was put by my father to the increase of the collection, after every inch of the cases lining all four walls of the room was filled. All along, my mother had been buying books and prints, at first to identify the lead soldiers and then to enlarge her knowledge of the subject, and she now turned her focus completely to those areas. That collection, too, began to grow mightily.
Her sources were originally limited to those second-hand shops in the United States which turned out to have books in her field, despite the denials of the proprietors, when she was given the opportunity to climb ladders and poke into back rooms. Later she discovered there were whole shops in Europe devoted to the subject. When, in the Battle of Britain, a bomb fell on Ackermann’s, the firm that had published the most notable uniform book sand prints issued in England over the past 150 years, she suddenly wondered what would survive the war, and started buying at a tremendous pace. During those four years of submarine warfare, she never lost a book or print through enemy action, and imported thousands of items, many of which might otherwise well have disappeared in the hostilities.
Bookshelves sprouted in the upstairs hall, and my father began to complain that books were shelved behind books. The eighteenth-century walls began to deflect with the strain, in what she dubbed “the second Battle of the Bulge.” My father was again called in to design a new area in the very copious basement of 357 Benefit Street for print storage and study and for book stacks, with special lighting and dehumidifying controls. For the growing collection of “fête books,” some of which were of enormous proportions, he designed a case for the large room that had been added to the house by my great-grandfather, John Carter Brown, as the original fireproof home of the John Carter Brown Library, moved to the Brown campus only after the death of his son, the first John Nicholas Brown, in 1904. Book-collecting seemed to be a family disease.
My mother’s absorption in the collection became total. Any free moment was spent working on her catalogue, which was originally kept in small black loose-leaf notebooks, stored in an ingenious rotating cylindrical bookcase, again purpose-built. The true catalogue, however, was in her head. She could visit a dealer and remember, when shown an item, exactly the details of whether she owned it and, if so, where she had bought it, what condition it was in, and how much she had paid.
She put this knowledge to work in publishing her translation and adaptation of Lachouque’s history of Napoleon’s Imperial Guard, which she entitled The Anatomy of Glory. (My father quipped that it might have sold better if it had been called The Glory of Anatomy.) The edition was fully illustrated from her collection, and her knowledge of the Napoleonic era was daunting. She also brought out the volume illustrating the progress of General Rochambeau in America after landing at Newport, in a beautiful edition printed by Princeton University Press and illustrated by the unique collection of maps belonging to Paul Mellon.
To a great degree, however, her scholarly contributions were in her advice to others. As the collection became better known, people from around the world would write in or visit to verify iconographic details or to ask her help in dating pictures. I remember a trip through eastern Europe in which my father and I could date certain military portraits within a few years on the basis of style, but she could get it down to a matter of weeks by knowing precisely which medals the sitter had or had not yet acquired.
She was a founder of the Company of Military Collectors and Historians, and its treasurer for many years. Their periodic meetings at historic sites were very colorful. Although my father referred to them in the family as her “military nuts,” he loved going along, and their journal became an important scholarly resource.
In terms of acquisition, her early presence in the field let her snag enormously important material at prices that would seem ridiculous today, if such material were available at all. Although family advisors complained at the large amounts all of this was costing, the result represents a signal achievement, one in which the university community and future scholars and students can rejoice.
My mother, although the recipient of honorary degrees, never pursued her formal education beyond secondary school. Her knowledge of world history, not to mention military history, was nothing short of prodigious. She once remarked of someone that they were “educated beyond their intelligence.” Surely she was intelligent beyond her education, to a degree whose fruits we can now all share.
J. Carter Brown
Director, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
From The Martial Face: The Military Portrait in Britain, 1760-1900.