Collection Pop-Up: etchings of Henry James Stuart Brown

Join Sally Foster, Curator of Prints and Drawings and Jasmin Kleinman, Master of Art Curatorship student at the University of Melbourne who will be discussing the etchings of ‘amateur’ Scottish artist Henry James Stuart Brown (1871-1941).

The University of Melbourne holds 264 prints made by Brown between 1901 and 1936. Including multiple states, unique impressions, and self-published editions, it is the largest and most complete collection of the artist's printed works to exist. Belonging to Brown’s acquaintance and cataloguer Harold Wright, the collection came to the University by bequest through Wright's widow, Isobel in 1963.

Small in scale and exquisite in their quiet simplicity, little is known about Brown and his prolific etching practice. Skilled at using the drypoint method to draw directly onto the plate, he defied his amateur status to create a body of work that evoked the shifting times of day and changing atmospheric effects of sun, clouds, wind and rain on pastoral landscape. As R.A. Walker writes in the introduction to the 1928 catalogue The etchings of Henry Stuart Brown, ‘the distinction between an amateur and a professional is sometimes very fine.’

Jasmin Kleinman is currently undertaking an internship in Archives and Special Collections. She is cataloguing the University's collection of prints by Henry James Stuart Brown and contributing to a catalogue raisonné project of the artist’s works.