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 Oxford, and spent most of his life in Venice, publishing several books about the city. He also wrote for the Cambridge Modern History, was the biographer of John Addington Symonds, and was a poet and alpinist.

Born at Nice (then part of the kingdom of Sardinia) on 16 February 1854, Brown was the son of Hugh Horatio Brown, an advocate, of New Hall House, Carlops, who was a Deputy Lieutenant for Midlothian, and of Gulielmina Forbes, the sixth daughter of Colonel Ranaldson MacDonnell of Glengarry and Clanranald (1773–1828). The marriage was in 1853, and his mother was a good deal younger than his father, who died on 17 October 1866, at the age of 66.

Brown's maternal grandfather, Ranaldson MacDonnell, of Invergarry Castle on Loch Oich in Inverness, Chief of Clan MacDonell of Glengarry, had been one of Walter Scott's closest friends.

His other grandfather was Robert Brown, Esq. (died 1834), of New Hall, Carlops, a large country house about twelve miles from the centre of Edinburgh, mostly dating from the 18th century but incorporating parts of a medieval castle. Enlargements to the house in 1785 were designed by Robert Brown, who later wrote a play called Mary's Bower and a book of Comic Poems in Scots. He was a lover of art, commissioning new work by Henry Raeburn, Andrew Geddes and John Watson Gordon.

Hugh and Gulielmina Brown had three sons, Horatio, Allan, and Chadwick, who were sent to Clifton College in 1864. After their father's death, Mrs. Brown moved to Bristol to be near her sons. At Clifton, Horatio was befriended by a young schoolmaster, John Addington Symonds, who lectured on the Greek poets and became an important influence on his life. From there, he went up to New College, Oxford, in 1873, in 1877 gaining second class honours in Greats, although he did not take his degree.

Brown spoke Italian, French, and German well and was also strong in classical Greek, while a contemporary later described him as "a fair-haired, breezy out-of-doors person with a crisp Highland-Scottish speech".

In 1877, the Brown family found itself in a bad financial position. Allan Brown emigrated to New South Wales, and a tenant was found for the family home in Midlothian, Newhall House. In 1879, Brown and his mother decided to live in Italy. They went first to Florence, where Gulielmina Brown's Forbes aunts lived, and then settled at Venice, taking an apartment in the Palazzo Balbi Valier on the Grand Canal.