Rawdon Lubbock Brown (25 Jan 1806 in

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

– 25 August 1883 in

Venice Venice ( ; it, Venezia ; vec, Venesia or ) is a city in northeastern Italy and the capital of the Veneto region. It is built on a group of 118 small islands that are separated by canals and linked by over 400 bridges. The isla ...

) was a British antiquarian.

Life

He was born in London, the second child of Hugh William Brown and Anna Eliza Lubbock. He was baptised on 20 Feb 1806 at St James Church in Westminster. He spent most of his life at Venice in the study of

Italian history The history of Italy covers the ancient period, the Middle Ages, and the modern era. Since classical antiquity, ancient Etruscans, various Italic peoples (such as the Latins, Samnites, and Umbri), Celts, '' Magna Graecia'' colonists, and oth ...

, especially in its relation to English history. He came to Venice in 1833 to find the gravestone of Thomas Mowbray, the banished Duke of Norfolk mentioned in Shakespeare's play Richard II. In 1838, he bought the Palazzo Dario, but sold it four years later due to lack of funds. In 1852, he moved into the Palazzo Gussoni-Grimani-della Vida, which was his home until his death.

John Ruskin John Ruskin (8 February 1819 20 January 1900) was an English writer, philosopher, art critic and polymath of the Victorian era. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and pol ...

met him in Venice and had an uneven friendship with him. He died at Venice on 25 Aug. 1883, and was buried in the Lido cemetery three days later.

Work

His great work, to which he gave some twenty years and for which he received £200 per year, was done for the British government, by scavenging the Archives of Venice for reports written by the Venetian Ambassadors to England. He aggregated these reports to create the publication: ''A Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts relating to English Affairs existing in the Archives of Venice and Northern Italy''. This was unfinished when Brown died at Venice in 1883, but some further work was done on it by his executor

George Cavendish-Bentinck George Augustus Frederick Cavendish-Bentinck (9 July 1821 – 9 April 1891), known as George Bentinck and scored in cricket as GAFC Bentinck, was a British barrister, Conservative politician, and cricketer. A member of parliament from 1859 to ...

, before in 1889 the completion of the work was taken over by

Horatio Brown 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 Oxfor ...

(no relation).John Pemble, 'Brown, Horatio Robert Forbes (1854–1926)', in

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography The ''Dictionary of National Biography'' (''DNB'') is a standard work of reference on notable figures from British history, published since 1885. The updated ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'' (''ODNB'') was published on 23 September ...

(OUP, 2004)

Works

* ''Four Years at the Court of Henry VIII'', 2 vols (London, 1854), letters of the Venetian ambassador Sebastian Giustinian * ''Calendar of State Papers in the Archives of Venice'' (6 volumes, published 1864–1886) ;Attribution * *

External links

Rawdon Brown and the Gravestone of "Banished Norfolk"
19th-century English historians Historians of Europe 1803 births 1883 deaths British emigrants to Italy {{UK-historian-stub