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.)