Brown Dwarf Observations: A Review

The presentation is an invited observational review for the Cools Stars 21 Splinter session "Brown Dwarfs Beyond a Quarter Century", which was dedicated to the memory of Dr France Allard. Given the available time, the review includes only the topics most familiar to the author: the discovery of increasingly cooler objects, the application of model atmospheres to observations, and the advances made in our understanding of the physical and chemical properties of cold low-mass stars and brown dwarfs.