Details of Sculptor

Surname

Browne

Alternative Surname

First Name

Joseph

Initial of Surname

B

Year of Birth/Baptism

Flourished

1814-45

Year of Death

Biographical Details

Browne was a supplier of marble, scagliola and artificial stone, who also occasionally worked as an architect. He was in business by 1814, for in that year he enlarged the dining room (now the library) at Raby Castle, County Durham, adding a screen of scagliola Ionic columns. The following year he provided scagliola columns and verd antique stands for Ashridge Park, Herts and ornaments for Ashburnham Place, Sussex, including scagliola columns and 4 composition capitals. A bill for carpenters’ and joiners’ work receipted by Ashburnham on 11 July 1815 amounted to £11,738 3s 2d. When James George Bubb became bankrupt in 1820, Browne took over his artificial stone business. He continued to oversee this enterprise until about 1827, employing Bubb as a designer and modeller. Between 1823 and 1829 Browne was employed at Buckingham Palace, supplying marble chimneypieces at a cost of £6,000 (17), as well as Corinthian columns, bases and pilasters for the Picture Gallery, pilasters with sunken panels at a cost of £1,278 for the Bow Drawing Room, and scagliola columns of lapis lazuli for the Blue Drawing Room (TNA WORK 5/119 fols 26-8). He also supplied marble to the value of £4,698 2s 9d, for which the Office of Works failed to pay him, so bringing him ‘to the very verge of ruin’ (ibid). He was the principal marble contractor for the Marble Arch (20) and in 1827 received a payment of £1,077 for work on the Arch, comprising ‘six cornices, 64 modillions, 58 coffers and six very large laurel wreaths in solid ravaccione marble’ (TNA WORK 19/3 fols 39, 56, 164-7).
In 1830, he held an exhibition of his collection of Antique marbles and other works of art, ‘forming together nearly two thousand elegant specimens of ancient and modern art’, at his premises in University Street, Bloomsbury (Library of Fine Arts, I, 178). He later added to this collection, buying a version of Johann Zoffany’s famous painting, Life class at the Royal Academy (Royal Coll, Windsor Castle) for £37 16s from Bubb’s sale in 1833.
Browne’s monument to the Peninsular War veteran General Chowne, which has a scrolled top and Doric frieze, is a close copy of the 3rd-century BC Roman sarcophagus of Cornelius Lucius Scipio in the Vatican Museum, Rome (5). Gunnis considered Browne’s monumental tablets dull but noted that one, commemorating William Kay at Tring, Herts, has a neo-Hellenic relief of a woman seated by an amphora (13). He was still at University Street and in business in 1842, when he sent a ‘bronze figure of a boy kneeling’ to the great collector Robert Vernon (Jenkyns Coll 7-19, Balliol College Archives, Oxford). It is possible that some, or even all of the works listed under J Brown (or Browne) of London could be from his workshop.
EH
Literary References: GM, 1833, I, 252; Gunnis 1968, 65-6, 67-8; RG/JP, 2, 199; Penny 1977 (1), 13; Kelly 1977 (2), 1432; Colvin 1995, 171; Curl 2001, 188, 216
Archival References: Ashburnham Accts ASH 2816 (1814-16); 2862
Miscellaneous Drawings: Design for a mausoleum, for Gordon Castle (?), SRO, Edinburgh, RHP 2378 no 42; design for a Grecian temple, for Gordon Castle (?), SRO, Edinburgh, RHP 2413
Tradecard: ‘Joseph Brown’ 1815, Heal Coll, BM 106.5