Born at Ayr, he was educated at Harrow and Exeter College, Oxford. He then went on to study art in London and Paris. He exhibited his first painting at the Royal Academy in 1895, but later turned to sculpture, his chief subjects being equine and equestrian. He also wrote knowledgeably on the subject of horsemanship. He designed a medal for the London International Medical Congress of 1913. At the outbreak of the First World War, he enlisted as a trooper in the Middlesex Yeomanry, but was then given a commission in the Royal Army Service Corps, on the strength of his experience with horses, serving with the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in Egypt and Palestine. He became art master at Bedford School in 1920, remaining in the post until his death from a heart attack while hunting. His most conspicuous work, the Memorial to the Imperial Camel Corps, was unveiled in the Victoria Embankment Gardens, London, in 1921. Brown was elected a member of the Royal Society of British Sculptors in 1909; in 1923, when the Society divided itself into Associates and Fellows, Brown was elected an Associate. He was also, 1920–25, a member of the Art Workers’ Guild.
Bibliography: Mapping Sculpture; S. Mitchell, The Dictionary of British Equestrian Artists, Woodbridge, 1985; The Times, 12 February 1926, p. 14 (‘Death while hunting’); P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 355–57, 438; Who Was Who (online edn), 2007.
Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011; revised Terry Cavanagh, October 2024