Kathleen Browne was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1905. After receiving her initial art education in New Zealand, she moved to London in 1931 to continue her studies. Browne is remembered as both a dedicated art teacher and a painter, whose works are distinguished by their warmth and emotional resonance.
Painter and teacher Kathleen Browne was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1905, the daughter of a journalist and an opera singer. She trained at Canterbury College School of Art between 1920 and 1924, and remained in New Zealand throughout the 1920s, working as an art teacher. In 1931, she left for England, settling in London, where she furthered her studies at Chelsea School of Art from 1932 to 1933, before enrolling at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in 1934. Browne developed a practice rooted in portraiture and printmaking, demonstrating particular skill in etching and engraving. Deeply influenced by the works of Rembrandt, her early etchings drew admiration from her contemporaries and students, with the latter nicknaming her ‘Mrs Rembrandt.’ She exhibited regularly, including at the Royal Scottish Academy, Royal Society of British Artists, and in the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition, where her works were accepted over five decades, including The Skaters (1949), Flowers and Grasses (1958), Interior of St Marco (No.1) (1978), Midnight in 1979, and The Fish Tank (2001). In 1950, her works were included in a three-person exhibition at London's Prince Galitzine Gallery, established by the Russian-born aristocrat Prince Vladimir Emanuelovich Galitzine. Browne was also affiliated with a number of artists’ organisations, including the Senefelder Club, Graphic Arts Society, and the Women’s International Art Club (WIAC). In 1947, she was awarded a bronze medal at the Paris Salon, a notable recognition of her skill as a draughtswoman.
During the Second World War, Browne held teaching posts in a range of institutions, including Royal Holloway College (now part of University of London), and worked for the BBC. She sustained a serious eye injury while helping to extinguish a fire caused by a German bombing raid. Postwar, in 1949, she opened her own art school in Chelsea, where she taught for the next three decades. She was known for her warmth and dedication as a teacher, and one of her best-known pupils was a young actress, Joan Collins, whose drawing Browne proudly displayed in her studio. Her school later became a shared endeavour with the Polish-born artist, Marian Kratochwil, whom she married in 1961. The couple travelled widely across Europe, visiting museums and galleries and painting together on their trips. In his youth, Kratochwil had attracted the attention of noted painter, Dame Ethel Walker, who, late in life, quietly named him her beneficiary. Browne later donated Walker’s portrait The Jade Necklace (c.1930s), to the Royal Academy in 1972.
For a period of time she also worked as an art education policy advisor for the colour-makers George Rowney and Company. In 1979, Browne retired from teaching to concentrate on her own painting. Her work, spanning drawing, oil painting, and printmaking, is characterised by a warm and atmospheric palette and a gentle yet expressive approach to line and texture. Her subject matter ranged from intimate domestic scenes and portraits to landscape, still life, and street scenes, often rendered with empathy and emotional sensitivity. Browne’s prints and paintings display a lyrical sensitivity to form, especially in depictions of children, performers, and working-class life. Stylistically, her soft, expressive brushwork and interest in light align her with elements of Post-Impressionism, while her figural compositions and lithographs show affinities with the socially attuned realism of the Euston Road School or Käthe Kollwitz’s humanism.
Her later years were spent in Hampstead, London and, eventually, at Compton Lodge care home in Swiss Cottage, where she remained artistically active despite the gradual loss of her sight. Towards the end of his life, Kratochwil published a sensitive monograph on his wife’s work, Kathleen Browne: Drawings and Paintings (1990) showing his admiration for her as both artist and teacher. The couple had a joint retrospective at the Polish Cultural Institute in 1994. Kathleen Browne died in London, England on 14 May 2007, aged 101. In the UK public domain, her work is held in the collections of the British Museum and National Portrait Gallery, London (which owns her portrait of early music pioneer, Arnold Dolmetsch).
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Kathleen Browne]
Publications related to [Kathleen Browne] in the Ben Uri Library