Brown, Nicholas (1769 - 1841)
Role: Benefactor, Treasurer, Trustee, and FellowDates: 1791 - 1841
Portrait Location: Sayles Hall 108
Artist: Harding, Chester (1792 - 1866)
Portrait Date: 1836
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 65
Framed Dimensions:
Brown Portrait Number: 2
Brown Historical Property Number: 590
Nicholas Brown was the sole surviving son, and namesake, of the eldest of Providence's "Four Brothers," an influential merchant family. He entered Rhode Island College at the age of thirteen upon its reopening at the close of the Revolutionary War, graduating in a class of fifteen students in 1786. This was the first year that flowing black robes were worn for the graduation ceremonies, and Nicholas gave an oration entitled "The Advantages of Commerce." He immediately entered his father's mercantile business, which he inherited at his father's death in 1791. He led the firm Brown & Ives with his brother-in-law and partner, Thomas Poynton Ives, throughout his life, becoming a active participant in the American China trade and leader in the development of railroads.
In 1804, Brown made a gift of $5,000 to the college to found a professorship of rhetoric and oratory, and in return the trustees voted to rename the institution Brown University. Lest it seem the college was easily "bought," historians have remarked that Brown's family had been benefactors of Rhode Island College since it relocated to Providence from Warren in 1770 and that Nicholas himself went on to donate gifts worth close to $160,000 in his lifetime. His donations included the lands along George Street, a law library, and personally imported works of English literature. Walter Bronson, an early-twentieth-century Brown English professor, wrote:
Mr. Brown was a Rhode Islander through and through. He came from an old Rhode Island family, bone and sinew of the colony and state; and he himself for fifty years a great merchant, whose ships were seen in all the waters of the globe?.In becoming "Brown University," therefore, the institution did not cease to be "Rhode Island College."
One of Brown's later gifts, the $20,000 cost for the 1822 construction of Hope College (named for his sister Hope Brown Goddard), prompted the Corporation to commission a portrait and offer a marble monument in his honor. Brown declined the monument and delayed the portrait for over a decade. In 1836, he agreed to sit for Chester Harding, then a well-known Boston portraitist. Harding painted a smaller version of this portrait for the family, which is now located in the Nightingale Brown House at 357 Benefit Street.