L'ombre de la croix

Sir Frank William Brangwyn was a Welsh artist, painter, watercolourist, printmaker, illustrator, and designer. Brangwyn was an artistic jack-of-all-trades. As well as paintings and drawings, he produced designs for stained glass, furniture, ceramics, table glassware, buildings and interiors, was a lithographer and woodcutter and was a book illustrator. It has been estimated that during his lifetime Brangwyn produced over 12,000 works. His mural commissions would cover over 22,000 sq ft (2,000 m2) of canvas, he painted over 1,000 oils, over 660 mixed media works (watercolours, gouache), over 500 etchings, about 400 wood-engravings and woodcuts, 280 lithographs, 40 architectural and interior designs, 230 designs for items of furniture and 20 stained glass panels and windows. Brangwyn received some artistic training, probably from his father, and later from Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo and in the workshops of William Morris, but he was largely an autodidact without a formal artistic education. When, at the age of seventeen, one of his paintings was accepted at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, he was strengthened in his conviction to become an artist. Initially, he painted traditional subjects about the sea and life on the seas. His 1890 canvas, Funeral At Sea won a medal of the third class at the 1891 Paris Salon. The murals for which Brangwyn was famous, and during his lifetime he was very famous indeed, were brightly coloured and crowded with details of plants and animals, although they became flatter and less flamboyant later in his life. Frank Brangwyn was born in Bruges, Belgium where his father, William Curtis Brangwyn, moved after winning a competition organised by the Belgian Guild of St Thomas and St Luke to design a parish church. His forenames were registered as Guillaume François. In Bruges, his father maintained a large workshop with several staff and worked on numerous civic projects as well as the parish church. William Curtis Brangwyn had been born in Buckinghamshire to a Welsh family and married Eleanor Griffiths, who was from Brecon. In 1874 the family moved back to the United Kingdom where William Curtis Brangwyn established a successful design practice. Frank Brangwyn attended Westminster City School but often played truant to spend time in his father's workshop or drawing in the South Kensington Museum. Through contacts made at the Museum, among them Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo, he obtained an apprenticeship with William Morris for whom he worked first as a glazer before undertaking embroidery and wallpaper work. At the age of seventeen, one of Brangwyn's paintings was accepted and then sold to a shipowner, at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, which strengthened him in his conviction to become an artist. Brangwyn joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve and began painting seascapes. He convinced the shipowner who had bought his Royal Academy picture to let him sail on a freighter to Istanbul. This trip provided Brangwyn with the material for several notable paintings. Whereas Funeral at Sea, which won a medal at the Paris Salon in 1891 was mostly composed in grey, The Golden Horn, Constantinople was much brighter and full of colour. Although Brangwyn held his first one-man show in London in 1891, he spent most of that year and 1890 at sea, visiting Spain several times as well as returning to Istanbul and travelling to South Africa and Zanzibar. In 1892 he visited northern Spain with the Scottish artist Arthur Melville, travelling from Saragossa along the Canal Imperial de Aragon on the barge, the Santa Maria. Soon Brangwyn was attracted by the light and the bright colours of these southern countries at a time when Orientalism was becoming a favoured theme for many painters. He made many paintings and drawings, particularly of Spain, Egypt, Turkey and Morocco, which he visited in 1893. This lightened his palette, a change that initially did not find critical favour but helped establish his international reputation. In 1895 the French government purchased his painting Market in Morocco. In 1895, the Parisian art dealer Siegfried Bing commissioned Brangwyn to decorate the exterior of his Galerie L'Art Nouveau, and encouraged Brangwyn into new avenues: murals, tapestry, carpet designs, posters and designs for stained glass to be produced by Louis Comfort Tiffany. In 1896 he illustrated a six-volume reprint of Edward William Lane's translation of One Thousand and One Nights. In 1917 he collaborated with the Japanese artist Urushibara Mokuchu on a series of woodblock prints. For his austere but decorative designs he was recognized by continental and American critics as a prominent artist, while British critics were puzzled as to how to evaluate him. Through his collecting Japanese works, he became friends with Kojiro Matsutaka the Japanese industrial magnate, who became his patron. Brangwyn had an affair with Ellen Kate Chesterfield, which produced a son, James Barron Chesterfield-Brangwyn, born 1885 in Mevagissey, Cornwall. James later emigrated to Australia in 1909, initially working on a farm in Townsville, Queensland and later moving to Brisbane. In 1896, Brangwyn married Lucy Ray, a nurse, who died in 1924. They had no children. He leased Temple Lodge, 51 Queen Caroline Street, Hammersmith, London from 1900 to 1937/38 and bought The Jointure, Ditchling, Sussex in 1918.