Part 1 South Africa: my family; being a child in South Africa; dancing days. Part 2 London in the 30th -ballet and art dealing: the most austere of disciplines; the death of my mother; new movements in ballet; my introduction to art and artists; the Leger Gallery - old masters; meeting painters and critics; Paris; more exhibitions at the Leger Gallery; prologue to war. Part 3 The war years: the National Gallery in wartime - "Browse's Academy"; exhibitions and monographs - Sickert and others; the Hugh Walpole estate; Linden Gardens; "Degas Dancers". Part 4 Settling down after the war: forming a partnership; Roland, Browse and Delbanco in Cork Street; early exhibitions and gallery artists; ballet again, from the front of the house; "in sickness and in health". Part 5 Roland, Browse and Delbanco: the rise and fall of London as art centre; Roland, Browse and Delbanco and the avant-garde; discoveries and revivals - O'Conor, Rodin, etc.; "Balzac" at Hemel Hempstead; Sickert again; Scottish artists at the gallery; a variety of exhibitions; Forain and the monograph; change at Cork Street - the opening of Browse and Darby.
Lillian Browse was brought up in South Africa, and she returned to England in the mid 1920s to study ballet with Margaret Craske, joining the Dolin-Nemtchimova Ballet Company in 1930. She became ballet critic to the Spectator for four years in the early 1950s. She worked at the Leger Gallery from 1931 to 1939; then, during the war, she organized exhibitions at the National Gallery and for CEMA, the precursor of the Arts Council. She was a founder partner of the art gallery Roland, Browse and Delbanco in 1945, and also of Browse and Darby in 1977. It was Lillian Browse's neighbour Rex Nan Kivell, the founder of the Redfern Galley and a close friend, who christened her 'duchess of Cork Street'. She organized the Sickert centenary exhibition at the Tate in 1960, later exhibiting her own private collection at the Courtauld Instititute Galleries in 1983. Among her many books have been volumes on Augustus John's drawings, Sickert, Degas' dancers, William Nicholson (catalogue raisonne) and Forain's paintings.
'...an absorbing story, told with zest and great candour, so that it is entirely fitting that Browse's name should still adorn the facade of No.19 [Cork Street].' Evelyn Joll in The Spectator
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