Richard Brown Baker papers

Richard Brown Baker was born in Providence, RI on November 5, 1912. He attended the Moses Brown School in Providence, RI before attending Yale University, from which he graduated in 1935. Following Yale, he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and received a BA and MA from Oxford University's Honour School of Philosophy, Politics and Economics. After school, Richard's varied career commenced. His first job, in 1939, was as a reporter and editorial assistant for the Providence Journal, a post he occupied only briefly before he accepted the position of private secretary for Ambassador Alexander Weddell and his wife Virginia Weddell in Madrid, Spain in January 1940. He returned to the United States at the end of 1940 and in 1941 was a Social Science Analyst at the Library of Congress. From there he moved to the Office of Strategic Services and worked in Washington, London, and Paris as a Research Analyst. His last employer was the Central Intelligence Agency as a Foreign Affairs Officer. He quit in 1948 to focus on developing his career as a writer.

Baker's writing career was brief but he did publish two works in 1952: a book of poetry entitled Stairways to Another Stage and a book based on the diary he kept while in London during 1944, entitled The Year of the Buzz Bomb. His books were not the success that he hoped for and he decided to focus on modern art, moving to New York City in 1952 to begin painting. He briefly studied with the painters Hans Hoffman and Morris Kantor, but then turned his energy toward collecting art.

Baker's career as an art collector suited him very well. He became a famous art collector, owning over 1,600 works of art before he died. He focused almost exclusively on young emerging artists and was often the first collector to purchase works from artists who became famous, such as Roy Lichtenstein and Jackson Pollock. He lent works of art from his collection to museums and galleries throughout the world, enabling many exhibitions of new works. He was an avid traveler and he documented his international trips in his diaries and letters to family. He did on January 22, 2002 in Shelburne, VT.