Lot 303: FREDERICK BROWN 1851-1941

signed and dated l.r.: FRED BROWN/ 1880

oil on canvas

59 by 77 cm., 23 1/4 by 30 1/4 in.

London, Royal Academy, 1880, no. 1491 as 'Waiting for the Boat'

Belgravia, Sotheby's, 16 November 1976, lot 90

Frederick Brown was born in Chelmsford and studied at the Royal College of Art between 1868 and 1877 and in Paris in the ateliers of Robert-Fleury and William Adolphe Bougereau in 1883. He became a talented painter of landscape and genre and was a successful art teacher, first at the Westminster School of Art and later as a professor at the Slade in direct succession to Alphonse Legros, from 1892 to 1918. He was one of the founding members of the New English Arts Club in 1886 and compiled the rules of the society. A self portrait by Brown was bought under the terms of the Chantrey Bequest in 1933 for the Tate Gallery.

Brown began to exhibit at the Royal Academy from 1879 with a study of firelight entitled A Merry Maiden and Rigging the Boat. Waiting for the Boat was Brown's third Academy exhibit which was accompanied by another work entitled Going Out. at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1880. Brown was a resident of Chelsea in its most lively period in the 1870s and 1880s when Rossetti and George Elliot lived in grand houses on Cheyne Walk and Thomas Carlyle could often be found strolling the streets on his evening walk. A year after Waiting for the Boat Brown painted Carlyle's Chelsea as another celebration of this artistic enclave on the river which harboured so many of the great geniuses of the nineteenth century.

Waiting for the Boat was painted in the year after Frederick Brown's move to Park Lodge on Church Street and depicts one of the landing stages on the north side of the Thames. The chelsea pensioners with their red jackets and three-cornered hats pin-point the locale precisely and the woman dressed in her finery is suggestive of the young ladies who could be found in the pleasure gardens of Cremorne or waiting outside the various artist's studios along the river. The scene is similar to the glamorous boating pictures by Tissot although the figures are more modestly attired than Tissot's rather flamboyant ladies with parasols and expensive dresses.