Frank Brangwyn
(1867 - 1956)
Jesus Falls for the Second Time
Forthcoming
Frank Brangwyn (1867 - 1956)
Watercolour
Signed, bottom left
11 1/5 x 17 1/12 in. (28.5 x 43.5 cm)
Size:
Height – 28.5cm
Width – 43.5cm
In 1887, the Soho colourman dealer, Frederick Mills, generously offered to finance Frank Brangwyn for a trip to Cornwall. Mills was renowned for his support for young and gifted artists and quickly recognised Brangwyn’s talent and his burning ambition to paint the life of the sea. The artist’s love of the ocean was fired more than ever after his move from Bloomsbury to Chelsea and the river earlier that year. He joined the Royal Naval Volunteers with his friend Frank Short and together they performed gunnery drill on the President, an old warship in the West India Dock, sketched and painted sailors and their ships and made frequent journeys down the Thames aboard the Garibaldi.
Desperately poor at this time, Brangwyn managed to scrape together enough funds by working on designs for William Morris, for a short three week painting trip to Rye, a picturesque fishing town in East Sussex. This is one of the resulting watercolours from his time there.
Frank Brangwyn was born in Bruges, Belgium, the son of an English father and Welsh mother. The family returned to London in 1874, Brangwyn’s father gaining work as a designer of buildings, embroideries and furniture. Although Brangwyn appears to have had little formal education, whether academic or artistic, his earliest mentors were three of the most influential men in design at the turn of the century: Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo, William Morris and Siegfried Bing. Between 1884 and 1887 Brangwyn travelled to Kent, Cornwall and Devon, before venturing further with trips to Turkey in 1888, South Africa in 1891, Spain in 1892 and Morocco in 1893.
Brangwyn was an independent artist, an experimenter and innovator, capable of working on both large and small scale projects, ranging from murals, oil paintings, watercolours, etchings, woodcuts and lithographs to designs for architecture, interiors, stained glass, furniture, carpets, ceramics and jewellery, as well as book illustrations, bookplates and commercial posters. It is estimated that he produced over 12,000 works during his lifetime. Mural commissions included the Worshipful Company of Skinners, London (1902-09), St Aidan’s church, Leeds (1908-16), Manitoba Legislative Building, Winnipeg, Canada (1918-21), Christ’s Hospital, Horsham (1912-23), State Capitol, Jefferson City, USA (1915-25), the British Empire panels, Swansea (1925-32), and Rockefeller Center, New York (1930-34). Brangwyn married Lucy Ray in 1896 and took on the lease of Temple Lodge, Hammersmith, in 1900. In 1918 the artist purchased The Jointure, Ditchling, where he spent most of his time following his wife’s death in 1924. Elected RA in 1919, knighted in 1924, holder of countless artistic awards, Brangwyn was modest about his singular achievements, regarding art as an occupation and describing himself as a designer.
