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Overview
The impressively autodidactic Sir Frank Brangwyn (1867–1956), was a highly versatile painter, draughtsman, and printmaker. He also possessed expertise in other areas of the Arts and Crafts movement, such as ceramics, illustration and decorative painting.
Although he had little formal artistic training, Brangwyn spent much of his youth learning in his father’s architecture studio. He was also encouraged to spend time at the South Kensington Museum, where he met the leading Arts and Crafts movement figure, A.H. Mackmurdo who introduced him to William Morris. Morris employed Brangwyn within his studio, teaching him to work first with glazes before he moved on to inlay work, embroidery and wallpapers.
During this time, Brangwyn also experimented with painting, getting a work accepted into the 1885 Royal Academy exhibition when he was just seventeen. In the following years Brangwyn would travel vastly throughout different countries such as Spain, Palestine, Constantinople and Turkey. The exposure to different kinds of light and non-western patterns he encountered on these travels helped him to develop further as a painter; advancing from the realism of his first few notable works such as Burial at Sea (1890) (Glasgow Museum Resource Centre), which featured heavily muted palettes, to the decadently bright British Empire Panels (c.1930) (Brangwyn Hall, Swansea).
Murals and decorations grew to be a particular interest to Brangwyn after he was commissioned in 1895 by art dealer Siegfried Bing to decorate the façade of his new and soon to be celebrated Parisian art gallery, L’Art Nouveau. Brangwyn’s experience in Morris’s studio proved invaluable here, as it involved the creation of murals and other interior elements, such as the decorative carpet.
In the early 1900s Brangwyn was one of the most revered artists and muralists in Britain, Europe, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. He was elected a Royal Academician in 1919, knighted in 1941, held the presidency of a number of societies and received countless medals, diplomas and distinctions from Britain and overseas. Many important exhibitions of his work were organised in 1952 Brangwyn became the first living artist to be honoured with a retrospective show at the RA. Yet he remains strangely underrated today.
Sources:
Alan Windsor, ‘Brangwyn, Sir Frank William’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, September 2004, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/32046, accessed: 12 February 2018.
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