Sidney Brown (engineer)

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Sidney William Brown (born March 7, 1865 in Winterthur , † August 1, 1941 in Baden ) was a Swiss machine designer and art collector.

Live and act

Sidney Brown was born as one of six children to British inventor Charles Brown and his Winterthur wife Eugénie Pfau. His older brother was the machine designer Charles Eugene Lancelot Brown . Like his brother, Sidney Brown studied mechanical engineering at the Technikum Winterthur and was one of the founding members of the Velocipedeclub Winterthur , of which he was the first president. After completing his studies, he and his father went to what would later become the Oerlikon machine factory in 1884 . After his brother founded Brown, Boveri & Cie. Together with Walter Boveri in 1891 . Sidney Brown became technical director and later a member of the board of directors.

In 1896 Brown married the industrialist daughter Jenny Sulzer. The couple went on their honeymoon to Paris, where they bought Eugène Boudin's picture of laundresses . You are one of the first collectors in Switzerland to collect modern French painting. In the next few years, the focus of her collection was initially on painters from the Munich School such as Ludwig Herterich , Leo Putz and Franz von Stuck . Her Villa Langmatt , built in 1901 in Baden, received its own gallery extension in 1906 for the collection of paintings. From 1908 onwards, the Brown couple, advised by the painter Carl Montag , began to regularly acquire paintings by the French impressionists in Paris . In a few years they collected pictures by Paul Cézanne , Paul Gauguin , Camille Pissarro , and Pierre-Auguste Renoir . They also acquired valuable furniture, china, clocks, silver and books. After the death of her son John A. Brown in 1987, the villa and its collections were placed in a foundation and has been open as a museum since 1990.

Awards

  • 1916 honorary citizen of Baden
  • 1930 honorary doctorate from ETH Zurich

literature

  • Andreas Steigmeier : Brown, Sidney William. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
  • Norbert Lang: Charles EL Brown and Walter Boveri. Founder of a global company. Association for Economic History Studies, 1992, ISBN 3909059015 .
  • Florens Deuchler: The French Impressionists and their predecessors. Langmatt catalog, 1990, ISBN 3855450447 .
  • Eva-Maria Preiswerk-Lösel: A House for the Impressionists - The Langmatt Museum. Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2001, ISBN 3775710175 .
  • Meet the Browns. Badener Neujahrsblätter 2012. Published by the Baden Literary Society and the Association for Local Studies of the Baden District. Hier + Jetzt, Verlag für Kultur und Geschichte, Baden 2011.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Natascha Wey : Approaches to the Browns. Book review in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on December 16, 2011, accessed on December 17, 2011.