Ralph Brown
b. 1928
Ralph Brown was born in Leeds, and is the younger contemporary of the eminent group of Yorkshire sculptors that include Kenneth Armitage, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. He studied at Leeds College of Art, where both Moore and Hepworth attended, and the Royal College of Art where he was taught by Frank Dobson, John Skeaping and Leon Underwood.
Like Moore, who befriended him and encouraged him by buying his work, Brown’s art is deeply rooted in the figurative tradition. However, whilst his contemporaries focused their energies on carving and maintaining ‘truth to materials’, Brown has always concentrated on modelling allowing him to interact with his material on a more intimate level. Dennis Farr, commented in the introductory catalogue essay for Brown’s major retrospective show at Leeds City Art Gallery in 1988 that: “So much of Brown’s sculpture is his search for equivalents, in formal terms, for sensual experiences.”
Brown came to national prominence in the late 1950s with his large-scale bronze group Meat Porters, commissioned for Harlow New Town, Essex. Prior to this he won a number of scholarships including a trip to Paris to work in the studio of Ossip Zadkine, where he also saw work by Rodin and Germain Richier and met Giacometti. In 1957 he won the Boise Scholarship to Italy and studied Etruscan Sculpture. Brown also worked in Cannes making mosaics for Picasso, and was inspired by the work of Marino Marini and Giacomo Manzu.
During the fifties Brown’s work attracted much critical acclaim and was shown alongside his contemporaries Armitage, Turnbull and Paolozzi. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, when abstraction prevailed in British sculpture, Brown remained faithful to the human figure and he has long stood out among his contemporaries as the master of human anatomy. Brown was elected a Royal Academician in 1972 and his work can be found in many public collections including the Arts Council of Great Britain, Bristol City Art Gallery, Leeds City Art Gallery, The National Museum of Wales and the Tate Collection, London.
