Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale: Last Days

"The Little Foot Page"
by Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale

"Though Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale remained creatively active well into her sixties, the sense of decline if not closure expressed in her complaint of 1927 that 'Pre-Raphaelitism is no longer wanted', is echoed in a large painting she embarked upon in 1929 in which she assembled colleagues, friends and relatives in the benign presence of Mary the mother of Jesus. In valedictory manner, they each embody a different century, from the first till the present) which is represented by the banner each holds up and made clear by their period costume. Letters to her brother Charles, who figured in the composition, show that it was a self-imposed task, for which the artist did not expect to find a buyer. Be that as it may, it found a home as an altarpiece for the Kensington church of St. George's, Campden Hill.

In 1938, Fortescue-Brickdale suffered a stroke that ended her painting career for the remaining seven years of her life. She died on March 10, 1945, and was buried at Brompton Cemetery, London. In the edition of The Times of March 14, 1945, the following obituary appeared [excerpted here]:

'A Versatile Artist. Miss Fortescue-Brickdale RWS, painter, modeller, and designer of stained glass, and black and white artist died on March 10th as briefly announced in our columns yesterday. She was the last survivor of the late Pre-Raphaelite painters, who though – or possibly because – they did not come into personal contact with the original Brotherhood, carried some of their principles to extremes. Her nearest affinity was with the late Byam Shaw, and she was at the height of her reputation about the same time as he.

It was the allegorical side of Pre-Raphaelitism that Miss Fortescue-Brickdale inherited, and her work was distinguished by brilliance of colour and great fidelity to detail... She deserves to be remembered for her consistent fidelity to the tradition."

(Excerpts from "A Pre-Raphaelite Journey: The Art of Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale" by Pamela Gerrish Nunn and "The Times," March 14, 1945.) 

 

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale: Illness

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale illustration
for "Book of Old English Songs & Ballads"

"Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, now fifty years old, fell seriously ill in the early 1920s. In June 1923 a friend's diary records, 'Bricky is better but her hands are still bandaged', while in September another friend recorded, 'Isn't it dreadful about the bad time poor Eleanor has been having? She is so good and patient but she has masses of work to do and can't touch a pencil'. In December the commissioners of an altarpice heard from Charles Fortescue-Brickdale that 'his sister is slowly recovering from her long illness and hopes to resume work in January'. As it was she spent the last part of 1923 convalescing at Amelie les Bains, the Pyrenean spa town.

As a consequence of this illness, as yet unidentified, Fortescue-Brickdale's sight began to deteriorate, leading her to favour larger-scale work rather than the finely worked watercolors in which she had specialized. An altarpiece was commissioned for the Chapel of Remembrance in the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924, and was followed by another triptych, entitled 'Knightly Service,' for the Winchester College for boys in Hampshire. 

Her last solo 'coloured book' appeared in 1925 with twelve plates by the artist, whose choice of texts allowed her to shift her attention from the medieval, which had so occupied her over the years, to the Jacobean and Carolingian. This modest amount of pictorial content probably reflected her capacity to work on fine detail since her illness. 

Though the late 1920s brought a marked decrease in Fortescue-Brickdale's exhibition appearances, these years saw a number of her window designs realized in churches large and small around the country. These included the sad mission of commemorating the younger of her two brothers, John, who had died in 1921 and two other members of the congregation of his church."

To be continued

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

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.) 

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale: WWI

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale illustration for
"Old English Songs and Ballads

"When Britain entered the war in August 1914 it was by no means clear what aspects of life would be affected by it and, in the event, the patterns of artistic life were variously altered. While there was an argument that luxuries such as art should be abandoned - and there were many instances of artists themselves declaring their profession redundant in the face of this cataclysm - there was an equal argument that they were especially cheering as the strife escalated, and in any case there was the question of how artists were to continue to support themselves during the conflict. As the 'Burlington Magazine's book reviewer wrote, on the re-issue of Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale's 'Idylls' in a cheaper edition for the 1914 Christmas market: 'In the midst of national dangers, domestic sorrows, and financial difficulties... a good many publishers are exerting themselves to provide pastime and distraction, especially for younger and less critical readers, and they deserve every encouragement for doing so.'

Thus, however unintentionally, her next 'coloured book' was perhaps helped to a good reception by its underplayed nationalism. The 'Book of Old English Songs and Ballads' was published in 1915, carrying 24 coloured plates. It played to the artist's strengths, with the classic Pre-Raphaelite figure in nature visualizing 'Barbara Allen', 'The Wish', 'Who Is Silvia?' and other poems. Her weakness for cherubic cupids is in evidence, but the pages were modernized by banishment of the decorative borders which, since the 189s, had been 'de rigueur' where Arthurian subject-matter was concerned.

While in 1917, art was included in the National Service Bill's list of non-essential industries which gave a man of the relevant age no protection from conscription, for women artists the question arose, what should they do for or about the war? Some male artists joined the armed services - and Lucy Kemp-Welch was one female artist who tried to - but the most obvious way for artists of either sex to support the war was through fundraising exhibitions of work - and Fortescue-Brickdale appeared in the RWS exhibition of February 1914 and the vast Red Cross sale in February 1918. She contributed also to the philanthropy expected of her class, serving on the council of the Imperial Arts League (a pre-war organization designed as a professional body for artists) from April 1914 until the end of 1916, and on the founding committee for the Star and Garter Home in Richmond, for which in 1916 she designed the insignia and a wartime medal for the London ambulance service."

To be continued

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

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.)