Anne Seddon Kinsolving Brown
(1906-1985)
Anne Seddon Kinsolving was born in Brooklyn in 1906, but grew up in Baltimore. It was there that she first became fascinated by military music and uniforms, and there that she and her brother started collecting toy soldiers.
After graduating from the Bryn Mawr School in 1924, she got a job as a feature writer and music critic for the Baltimore News. When she met and married John Nicholas Brown II in 1930, her childhood interest in toy soldiers burgeoned. The newlyweds spent a year in Europe, and Anne haunted the toy stores of Britain, France, and Germany—intending to furnish a room in her new home on Benefit Street in Providence with a military motif and a collection of soldiers.
When she arrived home and unpacked the boxes from her travels, the soldiers took up 288 linear feet of space. She started to document her collection, in order to properly catalog and arrange it.
During World War II, concerned that overseas books and documents would be destroyed, she started buying and importing to the US what became thousands of books on military history and iconography from the booksellers of England and elsewhere.
After the war she also began to collect original drawings and watercolors, photographs, postcards, and popular prints of military uniforms. Anne also worked to establish a national organization of military collectors and historians, the Company of Military Historians.
Sought out to identify pictures, write essays, and give lectures, Anne’s collection continued to grow, and she gradually transferred it to Brown’s John Hay Library. By 1982 this included 14,000 artworks, 12,000 books, 18,000 scrapbooks, albums, and portfolios, and 5,000 toy soldiers.
Gallery
Nehemiah Dodge (1774-1856)
Jewelry and silver design have been an important part of the Rhode Island arts scene for hundreds of years. Most are familiar with Cranston-based Alex and Ani, and many of us are also knowledgeable about the big 20th century brands in Rhode Island—Gorham, Coro, and Speidel among them.
But to fully tell the story of jewelry design and manufacture in Providence, we need to go back to 1784 when Seril Dodge, and his much younger nephew or half-brother Nehemiah Dodge moved from Connecticut to Providence. The Dodges are credited with developing the process of depositing a thin layer of gold or silver on copper or other base metals. Only the well-to-do could afford jewelry made of pure silver and gold, but the Dodges were able to design and make jewelry that could be sold to a wider audience.
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Anne Sedding Kingsolving Brown (1906-1985)
Anne Seddon Kinsolving was born in Brooklyn in 1906, but grew up in Baltimore. It was there that she first became fascinated by military music and uniforms, and there that she and her brother started collecting toy soldiers.
After graduating from the Bryn Mawr School in 1924, she got a job as a feature writer and music critic for the Baltimore News. When she met and married John Nicholas Brown II in 1930 (whose “Creative Rhode Island” biography appears elsewhere on this site) her childhood interest in toy soldiers burgeoned. The newlyweds spent a year in Europe, and Anne haunted the toy stores of Britain, France, and Germany—intending to furnish a room in her new home on Benefit Street in Providence with a military motif and a collection of soldiers.
When she arrived home and unpacked the boxes from her travels, the soldiers took up 288 linear feet of space. She started to document her collection, in order to properly catalog and arrange it, but found to her frustration that she didn’t know a lot about many of the items in her collection, and didn’t have the right materials available to learn more. She also realized the woefulness of her history education.
Her husband was an art and book collector, and she too started collecting books—all with information on military history and uniforms. She started seeking books through booksellers in the major American cities, and then went abroad looking for more material.
During World War II she was very concerned that overseas books and documents would be destroyed, so she started buying and importing to the US what became thousands of books on military history and iconography from the booksellers of England and elsewhere.
After the war she also began to collect original drawings and watercolors, photographs, postcards, and popular prints of military uniforms. Her husband, when he was serving in Europe as a “Monuments Man” in 1945-46, found for her an amazing trove of publications on military collecting in a Paris shop. Many of these had been commissioned by Nazi military collectors from the best artists and scholars in France.
After John returned from Europe, the Browns lived in Washington DC for three years, and Anne wanted to take that opportunity to establish a national organization of military collectors and historians. Earlier she had written to Frederick P. Todd, a leading authority on American military uniforms, who worked in the historical section of the War Department in DC. She had offered Todd her ideas on military collecting, and he had responded: “Go back to your toy soldiers, little girl, and don’t meddle with a subject that is way beyond you. Women should stick to their knitting and leave the problems of research to men.” But living in DC gave her a chance to meet Todd and develop a truce, and by 1949 they had founded The Company of Military Historians.
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In the nearly 20 years since her marriage, and the beginning of her serious collecting, Anne had become one of the world’s leading authorities on military uniforms—she was sought out to identify pictures, write essays, and give lectures. She also translated several works from the French. The first of these was Napoléon et la Garde Imperiale by Henry Lachouque, which she translated, illustrated with 173 plates of artwork from her own collections, and published under the title The Anatomy of Glory: Napoleon and his Guard in 1961. The work has been reprinted several times—with the latest edition released in 2017. With Howard Rice, she also translated and edited three diaries of French officers in the US Revolution, which were published under the title The American Campaigns of Rochambeau’s Army in 1972.
Anne’s involvement with the arts also extended to music—she was a trustee of the Providence Symphony Orchestra, a member of the national council of the Metropolitan Opera, and a director of the Spoleto Festival Foundation.
Anne’s collection continued to grow, especially after her three children left home and she acquired their rooms for more storage space. In 1967, after engineering studies showed the house floors were sagging due to the weight of the collections, five tons of books were moved to Brown University, and the rest of her collections were completely transferred to Brown’s John Hay Library by 1982. At the time, this included 14,000 artworks, 12,000 books, 18,000 scrapbooks, albums, and portfolios, and 5,000 toy soldiers.
After Anne’s death in 1985, ownership of the house at the corner of Benefit and Power Streets in Providence was transferred to Brown University, where it now serves as the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage.
Anne’s collections continue to reside at Brown, and are still growing. According to the Brown University Library website: “The Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection is the foremost American collection of material devoted to the history and iconography of soldiers and soldiering, and is one of the world's largest collections devoted to the study of military and naval uniforms.”
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Anne’s toy soldiers are beautifully displayed on the 3rd floor of the John Hay Library, and the gallery is open to the public. You can visit the collection Monday-Thursday from 10-6, and Friday from 10-5. Just ask the librarians on the first floor to show you how to get there!
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Catherine Beyer Hurst, MBA, Writer and Community Historian
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NOTE: Thanks to the Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection at the John Hay Library at Brown University for permission to use the photos in this post.
Further Reading
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This link contains information about Anne S. K. Brown’s collections at the Hay Library as well as a biography.
https://library.brown.edu/cds/askb/askb_bio.html
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This speech was delivered by Anne S. K. Brown at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 1968. In it she recounts how she began collecting and how she built her collection; she also provides an interesting and humorous description of a typical research project.
https://library.brown.edu/cds/askb/askb_speech.html
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Anne’s obituary in the Washington Post contains much information about her life and career.
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