Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale: Artwork at the End of WWI

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale illumination for Queen Mary

"Dealing with the war experience took various forms, and Fortescue-Brickdale was commissioned to create a kind of testimonial on it when various women's organizations employed her to create an illuminated address to Queen Mary, with a symbolic painting of women war workers to mark the royal couple's silver wedding in mid-1918. 

The immediate post-war time was also busy for her. She had resumed some of her previous duties at the Byam Shaw school in the 1918-19 academic year, judging the drapery and antique drawing prizes and taking classes in Composition and Illustration. His unexpected death in 1919 must have added considerably to the strain of these responsibilities, which continued until the end of 1923, when Brickdale herself became severely hampered by illness. She also took over Shaw's production of monthly posters for the Maternity and Child Welfare Department's magazine, producing over a dozen black-and-white designs.

Memorials to individual victims of the war were also in great demand even before it was over, and Fortescue-Brickdale's readiness to design for stained glass led to commissions from the bereaved amongst her patrons, including her most effective sculptural work, a memorial to the war dead of the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. The vocabulary of knights, angels and saints that she had deployed over the years seemed fitting to these clients for mourning and celebrating the rude loss of English servicemen which cast a shadow over Britain at that time. In the 'teams' of sacred figures she devised for her patrons - the three archangels Raphael, Michael and Gabriel who represent Hope, Comfort and Consolation; St. George, St. Nicholas and St. Joan of Arc: Chivalry, Fortitude and Faith - the heroic and the humble were combined to render the 'supreme sacrifice' more bearable."

To be continued

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