Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale: Branching Out

"The Pale Complexion of True Love"
by Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale

"Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale managed to supplement her productivity with a secondary professional life as a teacher. With Byam Shaw, and his great friend Rex Vicat Cole, she had been contributing since 1905 to the teaching programme of the art school of King's College for Women, teaching one morning a week at the Kensington premises. She was in charge of Watercolour with a second string in Composition.

In 1912 Eleanor also continued to expand her range of artistic output by designing a stained glass window for her patrons, the Buxtons of Newtimber, the first of many memorial windows she was to design over the next 25 years. There is no evidence that Brickdale ever learnt to work with glass, however, and most of her designs were executed by the firm of Burlison and Grylls, the longest-lasting of the Arts and Crafts glass specialists. The single figure of St. Francis in the Buxton window stood her in good stead for her next design in 1914, for the house of charity in Bristol founded by her maternal aunt Elizabeth Lloyd.

While piety is not necessary for an artist to make effective devotional works, it can be guessed that such projects spoke to Fortescue-Brickdale's own beliefs, which seem to have sat within High Anglicanism. Thus her illustration of William Canton's 'Story of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary' may have been labours of love as much as commercial undertakings, while numerous individual compositions of sacred subjects throughout Fortescue-Brickdale's oeuvre could have been provoked by the artist's own faith."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "A Pre-Raphaelite Journey: The Art of Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale" by Pamela Gerrish Nunn.) 

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdate: Success!

"Time the Physician"
by Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale

"Just before the turn of the century, Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale was not only well on the way to establishing herself as such but also making strong claims as a painter, with oils shown at the annual Royal Academy exhibitions. Her first, at the 1899 exhibition, 'The Pale Complexion of True Love,' advertised her admiration for Edwin Austin Abbey, but she made it emphatically clear that she had her own ideas, exhibiting not only literary subjects but original scenes addressing the abstract concepts that George Frederick Watts, above all, had promoted to the late-Victorian public. The titles of her exhibits over the next five years indicate a deep investment in these symbolic concepts: 'Time and the Maiden,' 'Time the Physician,' 'The Deceitfulness of Riches, 'Justice before Her Judge,' 'Love and His Counterfeits' established her as an allegorist.

At this time, Fortescue-Brickdale was diverted into watercolor by her next big opportunity and, while this made her name, it located her within the secondary rank of painters, since oil was still accepted as the primary medium for painting. This positioning of her practice came about through the commission in summer 1899 from the art dealers Dowdeswell's for a show of watercolors that came to fruition in June 1901 under the Shakespearean title 'Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made of' Subject matter included the Wattsian abstracts she had already essayed in oil, romantic anecdote, 'fancy pictures' and poetic moralities, with titles drawn from the Bible, Shakespeare and other literary favourites including Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti and Coleridge. Complex, interlocking spaces and a love of pattern, detailed costuming and vivid jewel-like color characterized these works.

It may have been this commission that promoted Fortescue-Brickdale's acquisition of her own studio in the west London area of Holland Park where so many other artists lived and worked, and it was spectacularly successful, with the press gushing with talk of overnight success, and all 45 exhibits said to be sold. Critics linked her definitively with Pre-Raphaelitism which, though born half a century before, was kept alive not least by the fact that Arthur Hughes and William Holman Hunt were still active. In the 'Artist's Review' it was said that 'Miss Brickdale's work combines great technical skill with an extremely felicitous, quaint imagination and rare poetic feeling... [This exhibition] should be sufficient to secure her a leading position among the women artists of this country.'"

To be continued

(Excerpts from "A Pre-Raphaelite Journey: The Art of Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale" by Pamela Gerrish Nunn.) 

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale: Patronage

"The Forerunner" by Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale

"The momentum that Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale's career gathered at this point highlights the other most crucial aspects of any artist's success, patronage. For this novice artist -a young, single woman without an artistic inheritance - the significance of the social network into which she was born and in which she moved throughout her life cannot be underestimated. Not only did it help in realizing her career but, moreover, it shaped it.

Not only did her brother Charles recruit her to design a certificate of registration for his newly established Land Registry Office, but she was featured in her brother-in-law J. Arthur Gibbs' book 'A Cotswold Village' with 20 pen-and-ink sketches of rural scenes described in the text. Gibbs was a friend of Edwin Austin Abbey, the hugely popular American illustrator who was a leading light at the RA at that time, and Abbey himself was known for putting opportunities in the way of his students whenever he could.

Her family and friends were in microcosm the readership of the new large-format upper-class weeklies 'Country Life' and 'The Ladies' Field,' begun in January 1897 and March 1898 respectively. Her charming and varied designs for these titles allowed her to work out a repertoire that she was able to develop and mine for years to come. They sat alongside contributions by her friends John Byam Shaw and others such as Arthur Rackham, Harold Nelson and Miriam Garden and, after her first appearance in January 1898, not an issue of 'Country Life appeared without something from Fortescue-Brickdale's hand until January 1909.

This sector of society was also a steady source of commissions for portraits and, with its big houses in extensive grounds and historic settings, handily facilitated Fortescue-Brickdale's growing need for historic, decorative and natural backgrounds for her watercolors and paintings. Another opportunity offered by this class was in the fin-de-siecle fashion for bookplates, which gave black-and-white artists another string to their bow. It is telling of her progress that by the end of 1898, she was keeping a notebook of sales achieved."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "A Pre-Raphaelite Journey: The Art of Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale" by Pamela Gerrish Nunn.) 

 

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale: Royal Academy Student

An illustration by Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale
for "Poems" by Alfred Lord Tennyson

"Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale applied to the Royal Academy Schools after graduating from St. John's Wood. The procedure for entering was to submit certain prescribed pieces of work which secured a person entry as a probationer. If the student proved themselves within the following three months, they would be admitted to a course of study which could last several years. Though Fortescue-Brickdale later related that she had had to make three attempts at attaining probationer standing, once admitted, on 10 January 1895, she proceeded to full studentship within only three weeks. The range of painterly models available to her at the Academy Schools can be surmised from the disparate teaching staff of those years: John Singer Sargent, George Clausen and Arthur Hacker.

Even while a student, she began to forge a professional practice with a headpiece appearing in the November 1894 issue of the 'Pall Mall Magazine.' Fortescue-Brickdale recalled that she was 'able almost from the first year to pay the expenses of my own art training. But it involved working very long hours - working at black-and-white before going to the school in the morning and also after returning home at night.' She also advised 'there are chances, which should never be neglected, for a student who is enterprising and has worked hard to gain some commission through open competition - for an advertisement perhaps,' for it was with such a piece that Fortescue-Brickdale first appeared in exhibition, at the Royal Academy annual show of 1896.

At the end of 1897, she was presented to the public as a designer and promising decorative artist by winning one of the annual prizes at the Royal Academy Schools."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "A Pre-Raphaelite Journey: The Art of Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale" by Pamela Gerrish Nunn.) 

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale: Beginnings

"Portrait of Winifred Roberts"
by Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale

"Mary Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale was born on 25 January 1872 into a financially comfortable family living in the handsome London suburb of Upper Norwood, where beautiful views over Surrey replaced the inner London surroundings in which the family had lived until a few years previously. She was the last of five children. Their father was a successful barrister who had married a judge's daughter, and when Mary Eleanor was a girl the household included four live-in servants and a governess for her.

Eleanor's choice of art as a career can be supposed to have begun as a pastime, developed into a vocation and eventually crystallised as an occupation and identity. At the age of 17 in 1889, she enrolled at the nearby Crystal Palace School of Art, Science and Literature. The chief offering of the school was its vast collection of casts and extensive picture gallery which boasted 'many admirable specimens of eminent painters...' Though this suggests that the primary opportunity it gave was in art appreciation and copying, Forescue-Brickdale later gave it credit for providing her with a firm foundation in design. Lectures in anatomy and composition and tuition in artistic wood carving and decorative art and design were among the opportunities offered. At the end of the 1890-91 academic year, Fortescue-Brickdale was awarded the annual scholarship for drawing and watercolours, and the following year a silver medal for watercolour. 

To make art her career Eleanor needed to move on to a more professionally oriented establishment, and in the mid-90s she joined the St. John's Wood School. This school was a stepping-stone to the destination of the Royal Academy Schools. It was claimed in 1895 that 'of the 394 students admitted to the Royal Academy Schools since 1880, 250 were prepared at St. John's Wood, and that of 86 prizes awarded by the Royal Academy since 1886, 62 of these were taken by old St. John's Wood pupils. Furthermore, all the St. John's Wood classes were open equally to women and men students, including study from the nude. It is likely that here Fortescue-Brickdale first met several eventual colleagues such as Frank Cadogan Cowper."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "A Pre-Raphaelite Journey: The Art of Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale" by Pamela Gerrish Nunn.)