(b Aberdeen, March 7, 1823; d London, April 5, 1904). Scottish administrator and collector. Educated at Woolwich, London, in 1840 he entered the office of Isambard Kingdom Brunel as a draughtsman. In 1861 Forbes became General Manager of the London, Chatham and Dover Railway Co. and from 1873 to 1899 was Chairman of the company. In 1873 he unsuccessfully contested Dover at a by-election as a Liberal candidate. He combined a successful business career with the formation of a collection of about 4500 drawings and paintings, the importance of which lay in the large holding of 19th-century French and Dutch landscapes and genre scenes; these he often lent to public galleries in Britain and abroad. He collected in particular works by painters of the Barbizon school, including Théodore Rousseau, Charles-François Daubigny, Jules Dupré and Jean-François Millet, and owned such drawings by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot as Ville d’Avray: The Pond, the House of M. Corot’s Father and its Summer-house. Among Dutch artists, he acquired examples of the work of ...