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.)