More than any single person since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, J. Carter Brown left his imprint and style on the nation's capital.
As director of the National Gallery of Art from 1969 to 1992, Brown capped the neo-classical buildings of the Federal Triangle that were Roosevelt's legacy with the angular modernity of I.M. Pei's East Building.
As chairman of the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts for three decades, Brown oversaw the debates over the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the planned memorial to World War II veterans, as well as the building of monuments to FDR and to Korean War soldiers.
Brown, 67, died Monday in Boston, of multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood. He had relinquished all his positions in Washington a few weeks ago when it became clear that intensive treatment was not working.
Brown, who became director of the National Gallery at 34, created blockbuster shows, brought modern art to its East Building and enhanced and expanded its Old Masters in the West Building. Although thoroughly contemporary, he maintained a continuity with the past that one might expect in a man whose family stretched back to the earliest days of America.
Pei's East Building, which opened in 1978, never seemed to intrude or clash with John Russell Pope's original domed and columned West Building of 1941. The lavender-pink marble face of the Pei building came from the same Tennessee quarry as Pope's gallery.
Brown showed the same sensitivity during his long tenure as chairman of the fine arts commission. Virtually everything built or rebuilt, renovated or restored in official Washington in the last 31 years came under his scrutiny.
He defended the design for the plain black marble Vietnam "wall" engraved with the names of 58,000 war dead and held out for changes to the World War II memorial, to be built at the base of the Washington Monument.
But no one escapes criticism in Washington. Two members of Congress called for Brown's neck recently because a few years ago he called the Marine Corps War Memorial "kitsch."
At the National Gallery, Brown was able to balance the popular with the scholarly, the modern with the classic, Pop Art with Old Masters. He greatly expanded the gallery's collection of 20th-century art, and for the first time bought works by living artists. In a coup, much lamented by the Baltimore Museum of Art, he wooed Robert and Jane Meyerhoff's collection of modern art from Baltimore to the National Gallery.
"One's definition of Old Masters changes with the times," Brown told The New York Times just after he was named director. "What seemed outre and risky when the gallery opened [in 1941] is now respectable. From the perspective of the year 2000, we're a little late in starting."
Brown stamped the National Gallery's sanction on the blockbuster, beginning with a display of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa in the 1960s when Brown was assistant to the director, John Walker. The exhibit attracted half a million visitors. An exhibition of archaeological finds from the People's Republic of China in 1975 attracted nearly 700,000 people. More than 835,000 came to see the Treasures of Tutankhamun in 1977. Annual attendance reached a record 6.7 million as early as 1981.
For a man with an extraordinary patrician heritage and a brilliant education, Brown brought a remarkably democratic approach to his idea of the museum.
"We are not like most museums," he told writer Russell Lynes, of Art in America magazine. "We have no regular constituency.
"A lot of people who come here are visiting the Capital and we are one of the sights to see."
The National Gallery, at the base of Capitol Hill at Fourth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, attracted visitors "who wouldn't think of going to their museum at home. I'm not interested in the visitation, as Congress calls the number of bodies who come here. The point is to get them to take something away with them, to have their eyes open. Then maybe they will go home and look at their own museums."
A tall, slim, elegant man with startling blue eyes and a shock of blondish hair, John Carter Brown was born in Providence, R.I., on Oct. 8, 1934, the younger son of John Nicholas Brown, a wealthy investor and bibliophile, and the former Anne Seddon Kinsolving of Baltimore, whose father was rector of Old St. Paul's Episcopal Church. His forebears included Roger Williams, the dissident clergyman who founded Rhode Island, and Nicholas Brown, the 19th-century manufacturer and philanthropist who endowed Brown University.
Brown graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1956 and earned an MBA from the Harvard business school two years later.
"I was the only person in the business school who wasn't in it to learn how to make money," he told Lynes. He was already determined to become a museum director.
He then studied with Bernard Berenson, the doyen of art criticism in the first half of the 20th century, in Italy, and spent the next two years at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris and the Netherlands Institute of Art History. He came home and took another master's degree at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.
With about as good an art education as you can get, he became Walker's assistant at the National Gallery.
And even while producing blockbusters, such as The Treasure Houses of Britain, Brown never sacrificed scholarship for popularity, as any listener to the National Gallery's Sunday afternoon lectures could attest. Lecturers ranged from the director of the Louvre, to experts on botanical art for the Medici, to Michael Fried of Johns Hopkins University discoursing on the painter Caravaggio. And the film series Brown instituted at the East Building often brings movies seen nowhere else in America and attracts one of the most knowledgeable audiences in the country.
The list of paintings the gallery acquired during his tenure is equally remarkable, from Da Vinci's Ginevra de' Benci, to Paul Cezanne's The Artist's Father, to Jackson Pollock's Lavender Mist.
Brown was a protean man of easy intellect, exceptional taste and infectious enthusiasm.
"I get carried away by all kinds of things," he told one interviewer. "When I'm in Greece, I can't look at anything else. But I've been in Baroque Germany and gotten on a Rococo jag. It's fun to see how it changes. Art gives you a kind of immediate time machine. And that's the great excitement of a museum."