Horatio Robert Forbes Brown (16 February 1854 – 19 August 1926) was a Scottish historian who specialized in the history of Venice and Italy.
Born in Nice, he grew up in Midlothian, Scotland, was educated in England at Clifton College and Oxford, and spent most of his life in Venice, publishing several books about the city. He also wrote for the Cambridge Modern History, was the biographer of John Addington Symonds, and was a poet and alpinist.
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Early life
Born at Nice (then part of the kingdom of Sardinia) on 16 February 1854, Brown was the son of Hugh Horatio Brown, an advocate, of New Hall House, Carlops, who was a Deputy Lieutenant for Midlothian, and of Gulielmina Forbes, the sixth daughter of Colonel Ranaldson MacDonnell of Glengarry and Clanranald (1773–1828). The marriage was in 1853, and his mother was a good deal younger than his father, who died on 17 October 1866, at the age of 66.
Brown's maternal grandfather, Ranaldson MacDonnell, of Invergarry Castle on Loch Oich in Inverness, Chief of Clan MacDonell of Glengarry, had been one of Walter Scott's closest friends.
His other grandfather was Robert Brown, Esq. (died 1834), of New Hall, Carlops, a large country house about twelve miles from the centre of Edinburgh, mostly dating from the 18th century but incorporating parts of a medieval castle. Enlargements to the house in 1785 were designed by Robert Brown, who later wrote a play called Mary's Bower and a book of Comic Poems in Scots. He was a lover of art, commissioning new work by Henry Raeburn, Andrew Geddes and John Watson Gordon.
Hugh and Gulielmina Brown had three sons, Horatio, Allan, and Chadwick, who were sent to Clifton College in 1864. After their father's death, Mrs. Brown moved to Bristol to be near her sons. At Clifton, Horatio was befriended by a young schoolmaster, John Addington Symonds, who lectured on the Greek poets and became an important influence on his life. From there, he went up to New College, Oxford, in 1873, in 1877 gaining second class honours in Greats, although he did not take his degree.
Brown spoke Italian, French, and German well and was also strong in classical Greek, while a contemporary later described him as "a fair-haired, breezy out-of-doors person with a crisp Highland-Scottish speech".
Career
In 1877, the Brown family found itself in a bad financial position. Allan Brown emigrated to New South Wales, and a tenant was found for the family home in Midlothian, Newhall House. In 1879, Brown and his mother decided to live in Italy. They went first to Florence, where Gulielmina Brown's Forbes aunts lived, and then settled at Venice, taking an apartment in the Palazzo Balbi Valier on the Grand Canal.
In Venice, Brown met the archaeologist Giacomo Boni, who became his colleague in a common passion for the antiquities of Venice and of Italy. Brown became a leading figure in the English-speaking community, churchwarden of St George's Church in campo San Vio, president of the city's Cosmopolitan Hospital, and honorary treasurer of the Sailors' Institute. He also befriended local gondoliers and fishermen, helping them in their battles, gaining the material for a book of local colour, Life on the Lagoons, which appeared in 1884. The ailing Robert Louis Stevenson (whom Brown had met in 1881 at Symonds's house at Davos, Switzerland) read it and wrote the poem "To H. F. Brown" to celebrate "your spirited and happy book".
Symonds joined his friend Brown for holidays in Venice, when they liked to drift through the lagoons in Brown's sandolo, called Fisole, which had orange sails decorated with a fleur-de-lis, or to play tre sette or bocce.
In 1885, the Browns bought a tall, narrow, tenement building on the Zattere looking down the Giudecca Canal and reconstructed it as a house called Cà Torresella. Brown's close friend Antonio Salin, a gondolier, also lived in the house with his wife and family.
In 1889, Brown took a job. The late Rawdon Brown (no relation) had been working for the British government's Public Record Office on Venetian state papers in the Frari, concentrating on the reports of Venetian ambassadors at the Court of St James's. He died in 1883, and at first George Cavendish-Bentinck as Rawdon Brown's executor completed some of the unfinished work, but in 1889 the task of taking it further was given to Horatio Brown. From 1889 to 1905 he spent his mornings producing calendars covering the years from 1581 to 1613. In the afternoons he would go out and about with his gondolier, Salin. Brown's name as an historian was made by the five volumes of Calendar of State Papers (Venetian) which he published between 1895 and 1905.
Works
Life on the Lagoons (London: 1884; 5th edition by Rivingtons, 1909
Venetian studies (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & co., 1887)
The Venetian printing press, 1469–1800 (London: John Nimmo, 1891)
Venice: an historical sketch of the Republic (London: Rivington Percival, 1893; 2nd edition, 1895), 434 pp.
Calendar of State Papers (Venetian): 1581–1591, 1895
Calendar of State Papers (Venetian): 1592–1603, 1897
Calendar of State Papers (Venetian): 1603–1607, 1900
Calendar of State Papers (Venetian): 1607–1610, 1904
Calendar of State Papers (Venetian): 1610–1613, 1905
John Addington Symonds: a Biography (1895)
Drift: verses (London: G. Richards, 1900)
Temple Primer: The Venetian Republic (London: R. Clay & sons, 1902)
Venice, chapter 8 of Cambridge Modern History vol. I The Renaissance (1902)
Bracciano, Viterbo, Toscanella (1904)
In and Around Venice (1905)
The Valtelline (1603–39), chapter 2 of Cambridge Modern History vol. IV The Thirty Years War (1906)
Honours
Cavaliere of the Kingdom of Italy
Honorary degree of Doctor of law (LL.D.), University of Edinburgh, 1900
Member of the Ateneo Veneto
Gold medal of the British Academy
Taylorian Lecturer, 1895