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.)