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.)