Roland, Browse & Delbanco exhibited and sold British and French art of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, with a strong emphasis on contemporary artists. The gallery opened in 1945 at 19 Cork Street, a street that was already home to the London Gallery (1936–1939, 28 Cork Street), Redfern Gallery (since 1936, 20 Cork Street), Guggenheim Jeune (1938/39, 30 Cork Street) and Mayor Gallery (since 1933, 19 Cork Street). Henry Roland, Lillian Browse and Gustav Delbanco took over the vacant premises of the Mayor Gallery and started their business in a gallery street steeped in tradition, that is still home to numerous galleries today (http://corkstgalleries.com/history/). Galleries founded and/or led by émigrés such as Marlborough Fine Art and Storran Gallery were in a few minutes walking distance, and the 20th Century German Art exhibition was held around the corner.

Gustav Delbanco (1903–1997) was a descendent of a Venetian Jewish trading family that moved to Hamburg in the 19th century. Delbanco, who held a PhD in art history from the University of Heidelberg, emigrated to London in the early 1930s. Henry Roland (1907–1993), né Heinrich Rosenbaum, came from Munich. His grandfather was the art dealer Adolf Stern, co-owner of the Königlich Bayrischen Hofantiquitätenhandlung A. S. Drey at Maximiliansplatz 7. Roland/Rosenbaum was awarded a doctorate in art history by Wilhelm Pinder in 1928 (Roland 1991, 12). In 1929 he went to London to look for work (Farr 1993). In 1933, together with Gustav Delbanco, he opened an art business at 199 Piccadilly, where the two established themselves as connoisseurs of 17th and 18th century art, their expertise being requested by museums such as the British Museum (Steven 2011). They succeeded in selling undervalued works of art at auction, for some of which they were able to establish exact attributions, including a Lucas van Leyden and a Rubens. After the outbreak of war, they closed their art business and Roland became an air raid warden.

In 1945 Delbanco and Roland opened a contemporary art gallery at 19 Cork Street with Lillian Browse (1906–2005). Lillian Browse began her gallery career in 1931 at the Leger Gallery in London. During the war, she organised temporary exhibitions such as British Painting since Whistler (1940) at the National Gallery, whose permanent collection had been moved to the countryside for safety (Farr 2006). Browse met Henry Roland when she started taking German lessons with him: “In those days all art books were in German [...] and so German was an essential language. Neither Gustav nor Henry Roland had much money so they had to do things like give German lessons. But they were widely accepted as men of quite remarkable knowledge.” (Browse, in Steven 2011) As a recognised art historical expert on modern art, Browse was an important associate of the gallery: she published monographs with the Faber & Faber publishing house on Augustus John (1941), Walter Sickert (1943), Constantin Guys (1946) and Barbara Hepworth (1946) and wrote the book Degas Dancers (1949). Browse also had valuable social connections, which helped the gallery establish a name for itself, as well as facilitating access to loans in the early years (Roland 1991, 54).

With exhibitions on Walter Sickert (1946, 1960), Henry Gotlieb (1948), William Nicholson (1948), Henry Moore (1948, 1957), Josef Herman (1955), and Graham Sutherland (1960), Roland, Browse & Delbanco made a name as a gallery for established and emerging contemporary English artists. Some artists, such as Josef Herman, Walter Sickert and Philip Sutton, continued to be shown at the gallery over decades (Browse 1999, 133). Roland writes: “It can be said in the course of our long partnership we put on so many Sickert exhibitions, and so many of his pictures passed through our hands, that I believe we may have handled a third of his entire oeuvre!” (Roland 1991, 56) The gallery held monograph exhibitions (Norman Adams, Rodin, Walter Sickert, Philip Sutton) and also showed its artists in constellations, as in the double exhibition of paintings by Philip Sutton and collages by Margaret Kaye in 1960. For some artists, Roland, Browse & Delbanco provided their first comprehensive presence in London: the emigrated Polish painter Zdzisław Ruszkowski, who had lived in London since 1944, received six solo exhibitions at Roland, Browse & Delbanco between 1948 and 1957. Prunella Clough had a major solo show at the gallery in 1949. Roland, Browse & Delbanco was also an exhibition venue for continental modernism: in 1950 the gallery presented a Lovis Corinth show, and in 1971 an exhibition on Paul Klee. Roland, Browse & Delbanco organised many group shows, including the widely reviewed 1951 Fauves. Painting in France and Abroad (Roland 1991, 67). For this exhibition, emigrants such as the art historian Rosa Schapire provided loans.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff was also present in the private collection of Henry Roland. He and Gustav Delbanco set different priorities: Henry Roland, who lived in Hampstead (6 Winchester Road, London NW3) owned sculptures by Moore and Rodin, works by Bonnard and Vuillard, and also collected Expressionists such as Erich Heckel, August Macke and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, as well as the Surrealist Max Ernst, whose Bride of the Winds and Forest and Sun Roland acquired for his private collection (Roland 1991, 69).
Gustav Delbanco also lived in Hampstead (20 Lyndhorst Road, London NW3) surrounded by historical and modern art that included works by Rubens, Rodin and Degas, while also collecting folk art, such as Staffordshire figurines (Steven 2011).
Lillian Browse, aside from her publishing and exhibition activities, also collected art works, including work by Walter Sickert, on whom she published two books, and the bronze Danseuse en Quatrieme Devant, Pointe Tendu by Degas, to whom she dedicated her book Degas Dancers in 1949. Works by William Nicholson, whose catalogue raisonnée she published in 1956, were also part of her collection. In 1982, she donated part of her collection to the Courtauld Institute in London (Farr 2006; Roland 1991, 63).

In July 1977, Roland, Browse & Delbanco held its last exhibition, Our Thirty Years in Retrospect (Browse 1999, 179). Lillian Browse took over the premises and founded Browse & Darby Gallery with William Darby, but left in 1981.
Lillian Browse’s memoir The Duchess of Cork Street. The Autobiography of an Art Dealer (1999) and Henry Roland’s memoir Behind the Facade: Recollections of an Art Dealer (1991) are – alongside the obituaries of the three gallery founders and the exhibition catalogues – important sources for reconstructing the gallery’s activities, which have so far received little attention from researchers. Gustav Delbanco, however, appears in the emigration histories of other people. After the sudden death of the art historian Rosa Schapire (1874–1954), Delbanco was responsible for her estate. He carefully arranged for her collection of works by the expressionist Karl Schmidt-Rottluf to be sold to English, German, Israeli and other international museums. In an application for restitution, Delbanco testified to the difficult life and professional situation of the sculptor Jussuf Abbo (1890–1953), who was exiled in London (Zucker/Zuriel 1959).