Henry Roberts - MBE and Director of the Brighton Library and Municipal Art Gallery
In October 1925, according to a contemporary report in the Brighton Gazette, Henry D Roberts MBE, the director of Brighton Library and Municipal Art Gallery, enjoyed a private meeting with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, at Mussolini’s HQ at Palazzo Chigi. How on earth, you could be forgiven for asking, did such an extraordinary event come about?
Roberts was a highly energetic and gifted administrator, and Brighton was lucky to be able to count on his services from 1906 until his retirement in 1935. From 1910 he organised a series of exhibitions featuring contemporary art from different countries. The initial show, Exhibition of Modern French Art, was the very first display of the French post-impressionists in Britain, including Bonnard, Cézanne, Gauguin and Matisse, predating Roger Fry’s more famous Post-Impressionist Exhibition at the Grafton Gallery in London by some months.
This exhibition proved ...