Robert Barrett Browning

Robert Wiedeman Barrett Browning, known as Pen Browning, (9 March 1849 – 8 July 1912) was an English painter. His career was moderately successful, but he is better known as the son and heir of the celebrated English poets, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, of whose manuscripts and memorabilia he built up a substantial collection. He also bought and restored the Baroque palace Ca' Rezzonico in Venice.

Browning was the only child of the poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The Brownings had lived in Italy for three years when their son was born at Casa Guidi in Florence. His mother, who had miscarried three earlier pregnancies, described him as "so fat and rosy and strong that almost I am sceptical of his being my child." His nickname Pen derived from his infant attempts to pronounce his given name Wiedeman (after his paternal grandmother's maiden name). As a cherished only child, he was, some felt, over-protected. Visiting the Brownings, the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of Pen:

I never saw such a boy as this before; so slender, fragile, and spirit-like, – not as if he were actually in ill health, but as if he had little or nothing to do with human flesh and blood. His face is very pretty and most intelligent, and exceedingly like his mother's. He is nine years old, and seems at once less childlike and less manly than would befit that age. I should not quite like to be the father of such a boy, and should fear to stake so much interest and affection on him as he cannot fail to inspire. I wonder what is to become of him, – whether he will ever grow to be a man, – whether it is desirable that he should. His parents ought to turn their whole attention to making him robust and earthly, and to giving him a thicker scabbard to sheathe his spirit in.

Browning was educated "with anxious care" by his father and private tutors at the Brownings' home in Florence, and, after his mother died in 1861, in London. Robert was anxious that his son should attend a university, and sought the help of Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol College, the leading Oxford academic of the day. With Jowett's help, Pen's Greek and Latin were brought up to the requisite standard, but Jowett was obliged to tell the poet that his son's command of English left much to be desired. Because Balliol was too demanding for Pen, he went to Christ Church, Oxford, where he much enjoyed the sporting side of college life: he delighted in swimming, rowing, fencing, riding and boxing. He did not, however, take to academic study and left without taking a degree. Encouraged by Robert Browning's friend the painter John Everett Millais, Browning studied painting and sculpture in Antwerp and Paris. Among his teachers was Auguste Rodin; among his fellow-students was John Singer Sargent.

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