Yeats-Brown was born in 1834 in Genoa in the Kingdom of Sardinia. His father, Timothy Yeats-Brown, from an English banking family, was the previous consul there. His maternal grandfather John Cadwalader was a militia general in the American Revolution.
Yeats-Brown was appointed British consul to Genoa on the death of his father in 1857. He later was appointed to consul to Boston, retiring from the service in 1896. In 1867, Yeats-Brown purchased Castello Brown in Portofino, which he restored over subsequent years, and where he died in 1921.
