Sir John Alfred Arnesby Brown RA

1866 - 1955

Born in Nottingham, John Arnesby Brown played in the Football League for Notts County, his four appearances starting with a 9-1 drubbing at the hands of Aston Villa in 1888. He was more successful as one of the finest painters of the British landscape in the first half of the 20th century, best known for his impressionistic depictions of dramatic skies over pastoral landscapes, often featuring cattle. Arnesby Brown studied at Nottingham School of Art and then with Sir Hubert von Herkomer at his Bushey School of Art from 1889–92. He painted in the Trent Valley and around St Ives in Cornwall, but is most celebrated for his depictions of the Norfolk landscape, around his home in Haddiscoe, to the east of Norwich, where he started living in 1910, having visited since 1896. For the last 20 years of his life, after his wife’s death, Arnesby Brown lived in London for much of the time. Arnesby Brown exhibited widely, particularly at the Royal Academy, and also at the Venice Biennale. Today, we recognise that he captured the Broadland landscape and its fields of cattle in the raking Norfolk sunlight, better than any of his contemporaries and most of his predecessors.