Collections : [Yale University -Yale Center for British Art]

This collection consists of a scrapbook compiled by Jack Brown, the first Librarian at the Yale Center for British Art. It includes chronologically arranged newspaper articles, press releases, and correspondence from 1964-1969. Also included are articles about the exhibition of Paul Mellon's British art collection at the Yale University Art Gallery (1965), his gift of artwork to Yale (1966), the appointment of Jules Prown as Director of the Yale Center for British Art (1968), and the selection of Louis Kahn as the Center's architect (1969).

The collection comprises thirteen manuscript volumes, each of which contains numerous illustrations as well as transcriptions of letters originally composed while Forbes was in India, with a particular concentration on the natural history of India. The manuscript was finished in 1800, although most of the drawings are those done at the time of the voyage, circa 1765-1776. Volume 1 includes a presentation page, dated 11 April 1800, in which Forbes gives the set to his daughter, Elizabeth Rosée Forbes. Elizabeth would later edit and revise the second edition of Forbes's Oriental memoirs (1834).