"One of the last survivors of the later Pre-Raphaelites—later, because they had no contact with the original Brotherhood—was Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale (1871-1945). Like Byam Shaw and Robert Anning Bell, she inherited the Pre-Raphaelite love of moral and symbolic meaning, of allegory and decoration, of glowing colour. As far back as 1901, before she was thirty, Percy Bate said that Miss Fortescue-Brickdale 'should do much in the future to exemplify the still living force of Pre-Raphaelitism as a school. She studied at the Crystal Palace School of Art and at the Royal Academy Schools, making her first appearance at a summer Academy exhibition in 1897. Concentrating upon water-colour work of a highly wrought character, she was necessarily limited in her output. She was elected associate of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1902 and full member in 1919. Essentially an illustrator, she put precise drawing into a jewelled setting of brilliant colour in such works as The Forerunner which depicted Leonardo da Vinci showing his model of a flying machine to the Duke of Milan, and The First Visit of Simonetta. As might be expected, she was a successful designer of stained glass windows; there are examples of this side of her art in Bristol Cathedral and at Brixham." [Hardie, 130]
Biographical introduction
Discussion
Works
Bibliography
Bate, Percy. The English Pre-Raphaelite Painters. London: 1901, p. 14.
E.B.S. "Eleanor F. Brickdale, Designer and Illustrator." The Studio [London] 13 (1898): 103-8.
Forbes, Chrisopher. The Royal Academy Revisited, 1837-1901. Ed. and Intro. by Allen Staley. New York: Forbes Magazine, 1975.
Hardie, Martin. Water-colour Painting in Britain. III. The Victorian Period. Ed. Dudley Snelgrove with Jonathan Mayne and Basil Taylor. London:R. T. Batusford, 1968.
Nunn, Pamela Gerrish. A Pre-Raphaelite Journey: Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012.
Sparrow, Walter Shaw. "On Some Water-colour pictures by Miss Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale." The Studio [London]. 23 (June 1901): 31-43? [copy missing pp. 43-50]. Internet Archive. Web. 27 February 2012.
Last modified 26 June 2020