Sir Frank BRANGWYN 1867 – 1956

Artist

Sir Frank Brangwyn

Title:

Study of a Nude Figure

Date of work:

Circa 1905 Medium: Oil on canvas 101 x 104.5 cm

How and when acquired:

According to a letter from Peyton Skipworth to Elizabeth Morrell Carrick Hill 1990, Sir Edward Hayward brought the painting from the Fine Arts Society in Bond Street London in 1972 when he was on his honeymoon with his second wife Lady Jean Hayward. Lady Jean later gifted the painting to Carrick Hill.

As Munchenberg reflected (1991, p31)

“The opulence together with the ornate carved fruit wood frame struck them as an ideal addition to act as a focus for the panelled entrance hall at Carrick Hill.”

Background

There are three important features about Frank Brangwyn.

He received little education and no formal art training and yet he had an oil painting exhibited by the Royal Academy when he was eighteen years old.

He produced over 12,000 works in his lifetime. He was prodigious and highly skilled almost all forms of art. He worked in oil, water colour,

stained glass, furniture design, ceramics, interior schemes, lithographs, etchings, woodcuts, mosaics, pottery, drawings photography and murals

At the height of his career 1900 – 1919 he was considered to be one of the greatest living artists. Today he is virtually unknown.

How did this happen?

Frank Brangwyn was born in Bruges, Belgium in 1867 the son of Anglo Welsh parents. His father (an architect and carpet designer) was in Bruges establishing a workshop for the reproduction of Gothic tapestries. When the family returned to England in 1875, his father experienced financial difficulties so that Brangwyn had to leave school at the age of thirteen.

He spent time in the South Kensington museums sketching from paintings, sculpture and archaeological finds. He was extremely gifted and whilst there he attracted the attention of Arthur MackMurdo one of the leaders of the Arts and Crafts movement. Arthur MackMurdo took him under his wing and introduced him to members of the century guild and got him a job in William Morris’s workshops.

A. Mackmurdo W. Morris

At the age of fifteen, as an assistant at Morris and Co he learnt the skill of enlargement, learning how to turn Morris’s designs into full size cartoons for wallpapers, carpets and fabrics and he also gained valuable experience in decorative composition.

He was influenced by Morris’s ideals, for example, he adopted Morris’s belief there should be no distinction between the artist and the craftsman and that an artist’s mission was to decorate life. As Brangwyn said,

“An artist’s function is everything: he must be able to turn his hand to everything, for his mission is to decorate life...he should be able to make pots and pans, doors and walls monuments or cathedrals, carve, paint and do everything asked of him.” (Horner, 2006)

Brangwyn also adopted Morris’s view that art should be for all. Again Brangwyn, “What business have we with art unless we can share it” (Horner 2006)

After two years Brangywn left Morris and Co to travel. He initially went to Kent, Cornwall and Devon and sketched and painted the sea and harbour life. At this

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time 1885 he had his first oil painting “Bit on the Esk” exhibited at the Royal Academy.

1886 “A ship at low ebb” His early style was realistic and his palette was subdued and tonal, reflecting the greyer colours of England. His art was popular and he was able to sell paintings and continue to travel.

He did not take the normal “Grand tour”, instead, he travelled to Turkey, South Africa, Spain, Egypt and Morocco. He travelled at different times with fellow artists Arthur Melville and Dudley Hardy and their painting style influenced his work. But the greatest influence on his painting was the warmth, vitality and exotic colour of the places that he travelled to.

“He heated his palette almost to boiling point and chose subjects for dramatic effect”. He made hundreds of sketches then returned to England to develop them into oil paintings which sold as soon as he produced them.” Treble (1980)

Arthur Melville Dudley Hardy

The French praised his work, his oil painting “The Buccaneers” caused a sensation and won a medal in the Paris salon in 1893.

The Buccaneers

In 1895, Siegfried Bing became his patron. Bing, a German art dealer who lived in Paris introduced Japanese art to the west and opened up the famous “Maison de L’Art Nouveau” gallery. Bing commissioned Brangwyn to paint two friezes each 180 feet long for the exterior walls and two huge panels “Music and Dancing” for the entrance.

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Maison de L’Art Nouveau Siegfried Bing

In 1897, Brangwyn was a regular at the Venice Biennale where he exhibited alongside Rodin, Monet, Redon, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley and Vuillard.

For the next nineteen years he was at the height of his fame and in great demand,. He gained medals for his paintings in Europe.

In addition to a phenomenal outpouring of etchings, oil paintings, interior designs, stained glass and mosaic work he received mural commissions that covered over 22,000 square feet of canvas including the following in San Francisco, Ohio,Venice, Canada and London.

Missouri state Capitol 1917

1905 The British rooms Venice Biennale 1906 Palazzo Rezzonico Venice 1900 - 1906 Modern Commerce Royal Exchange Bank City of London 1907 British rooms Venice Biennale 1902 – 1910 Great Hall of the Company of Skinners Dowgate Hill London (6 panels

measuring 9ft 6in x 10ft 6in 4 panels 9ft by 6ft (Brangwyns original “Fruits of industry” now in the Mildura Art Centre

1909 -1910 Canadien Grand trunk railway Offices London 1908 -1914 Committee Luncheon Room Lloyds register of Shipping London 1914 Court of the Ages Panama Pacific Exhibition San Francisco 1915 Horton House Billiard Room Northampton 1911 – 1915 Cuyahoga County Courthouse Ohio 1908 -1916 St Aidens church Roundhay Leeds 1918 -1921 Manitoba Legislative Building Winnipeg Canada

However, after the first world war, Brangwyn became increasingly unpopular with the British critics at the Royal Academy and especially by the new English moderns. Roger Fry was extremely critical. Fry felt that art and human experience were separate things. According to Treble (1980, p447)

“Fry had a profound aversion for art which was deliberately employed as the vehicle of personal emotion”. Brangwyn’s vivid murals resulted in the comment from Fry that they were done in “Cafeteria style”.

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“And so he became the ultimate example held up to students of the post Fry generations of how not to be an artist. The ostentation of his exuberance was after all “terribly un-British.”

A final humiliation came in 1930. In 1925 he was commissioned to create 18 large murals that would cover 3,000 square feet for the Royal Gallery in the House of Lords at Westminster. The theme was the British Empire. Brangwyn proposed that the panels would glorify the riches and natural beauties of the Empire.

In 1930 while still working on the murals five of the completed murals were shown to the Royal Fine Art Commission for approval and they were rejected. The romantic and emotional content and the riotous bright colours intimidated the commission. The panels known as the British Empire panels were finally placed in the guild hall of Swansea Wales.

Brangwyn was deeply affected and never quite got over this rejection. He gradually withdrew, finally becoming a recluse in his home in Ditchling Surrey. However he continued to work for commissions until the end of his life. One of his final murals was for the Rockefeller Centre in New York with Diego Rivera and Jose Maris Sert. He exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy even though his pictures were skied.

In spite of the critics, in 1924 he was given a retrospective exhibition at Queens Gate opened by the Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and in 1941 he was knighted and 1952 four years before his death he was given a one man show by the Royal Academy.

Influences

Although Brangwyn had no formal art education, his earliest mentors were three of the most influential men in design at the turn of the century. Arthur Mackmurdo, William Morris and Siegfried Bing. Amongst other things, Mackmurdo introduced him to the Renaissance, Morris trained him in observation and decoration, Bing introduced him to Japanese art.

According to Horner (2006),

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Bacchus and Adriadne Titian 1523

“In a desperate attempt to categorise his work critics compared his work to Oriental carpets, Italian renaissance artists and the old masters, in particular Titian, Tintoretto, Rubens, Rembrandt and Delacroix. He has been linked to various movements: arts and crafts, Century guild, French impressionism and Art Nouveau. And his paintings display fleeting references to individual painters eg Alphonse Legros and Alfred East, Dudley Hardy and Arthur Melville”

Alphonse Legros

“He was too impatient and imaginative to be restricted by the ideology of one particular school or person . He was a jackdaw of art adopting the most attractive or relevant baubles of each group and transmuting them into his own style”

His palette was influenced by the rich exotic colours of the countries that he travelled to. He loved and collected oriental rugs and tapestries and had a vast collection of oriental and Mediterranean pots which were often a feature in his paintings.

The Brass Shop The market stall 1919

Style

His work was usually based on the themes

Architecture, ships, churches, windmills and bridges The dignity of human labour and the working man Mediterranean earthen ware pots in all shapes and sizes Cornucopia of fruit and flowers indicating the pleasure he took in the

simple joys of life

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Brangwyn’s style has been described as a cross between muscular Art Noveau and historicist Baroque. The term most often given to his art is Decorative Realism.

“His design filled the whole area of canvas, the forms clearly defined and the colours intense. People, plants, pots, fruits and flowers flock together to form a busy ornamental exuberant composition.” Brangwyn (1978 p 163)

His use of colour was key to his style. “amazing virility, its wild, fierce dramatization, the tropical frenzy of its colour, and the staring heat which seems to leave the world with- out air, these are enchanted wild oats, and I wish young men of our race would sow them often.” Sparrow

And Horner (2006)

“The subtlety power and range of his signature blues is astounding.”

He used bold contrasts of light and dark colour to provide form. The term used to describe this technique of using bold light and dark contrasts affecting a whole composition is Chiaroscuro. Brangwyn became a master of the art.

He also used colour to create depth in the painting by the use of flat warm colours at the front and the cool blue sky colour to recede. A technique used in Japanese painting.

He wanted colour, design, composition and meaning but not symbolic meaning resulting in him frequently being labelled in a disparaging manner as a non intellectual artist.

Use of line

“Clearly defined lines and sense of proportion found in Japanese art become the basis of his work and certain motifs were assimilated into his work either consciously or unconsciously for example strong diagonals.”

Composition

Brangwyn often put the back of a figure in the foreground of his paintings. According to Horner (2006): “ as an outsider he didn’t expect to gain a grandstand view of important events and so the gallery gazer is frequently presented with the back of a saint of important personage.

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Technique

He used photographs as an aid to his sketches and was unashamed about this. He took the photographs and marked them up in grid for transfer to sketch.

The figures were then used as pattern pieces. He would re use certain figures irrespective of changes in context or the passage of time . In May 1921 Frank Alford wrote that whilst he was working on one of the murals for Jefferson City, Brangwyn suggested taking out the figures on the extreme left being a man carrying a basket and putting in its place a figure of a boy on a ladder pulling fruit. The same boy was used on a Brangwyn’s Skinners magazine.

The Work

The Study of a Nude 101 x 104.5 cm

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This large oil painting was painted at the height of Brangwyn’s fame and popularity.

The subject matter is one of Brangwyn’s favourites – The pleasures of life – The Cornucopia of fruit and flowers indicating the pleasure he took in the simple joys of life. As Horner wrote:

“He massed his foregrounds with fruits and merchandise in exuberant superabundance. There was no stint in his generous creation. Ripeness was all the world to Brangwyn. Here was the juice and the fatness of the fullness of life. . Here if ever British art was reckless joie de vivre” Horner (2006)

According to Munchenberg (1991)

“All is delightful in Brangwyn's bounteous world. The rounded shapes of pumpkins, grapes and buttocks jostle for primacy. Wine and water are in abundance, together with the most sensual of foods. Men and women are present, obviously enjoying each other and their repast, so this is not a nunnery, nor even a harem. No, Brangwyn is appealing to the hedonistic side of human nature. Study of a Nude Figure is about enjoyment, the enjoyment of ripeness of flesh, of fruit and bodies before everything withers.”

The focal point of the painting is the long back of the nude which, as noted, is a typical feature of Brangwyn’s paintings. The long languid body creates a diagonal swathe from the top centre to the lower right hand corner inviting the viewer into the painting and down into the feast contained therein.

His use of chiaroscuro is clear in this painting. The contrast of light and dark make the picture compelling to look at. The long golden body of the back of the

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nude contrasts with the darker rich vegetation and exotic fruits. When the picture is rendered in tones can see how strong the contrast is.

His decorative skill shown in the foliage which is painted like a tapestry, that almost camouflages a face which just appears out of it

The painting is complemented by a heavy fruit-wood frame of stylised acanthus leaves, almost certainly designed by the artist himself. Brangwyn was very aware of the fact that the frame can influence the way in which a painting is revealed, and the effect of this frame is to reinforce the primitive, organic nature of the painting.

“Brangwyn believed that a frame could enhance a painting by its colour its texture and its pattern and although he did not want to mould frames in a way that they became extensions of his compositions he at least wanted a frame to complement the style of his painting. He therefore designed individual frames for individual pictures. They were usually black or sometimes with a tortoise shell finish, in mouldings up to twelve inches wide patterned with the carved decorative character of his art. Alfred Stiles of Hammersmith made them.” R Brangwyn 1978

It is very easy to understand the reason why Edward Hayward would have wanted to buy the painting - as described by Muncheberg (1991)

“The richness and depth of colour first attracted them when they saw it at the Fine Art Society. That opulence, together with the ornate carved fruit-wood frame, struck them as an ideal addition to act as a focus for the panelled entrance hall at Carrick Hill. So this painting, full of warmth and feeling and very much redolent of nature's bounty, has found a fitting home in a warm mansion surrounded by gardens, half a world away from London's cold greyness.”

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Blibliography

Brangwyn R, 1978 Brangwyn William Kimber and Co, London, England

Horner, L , Brangwyn Bazaar Biography viewed June 2014 http://www.frankbrangwyn.org/Brangwyn%20the%20man.html

Horner, L 2006, Frank Brangwyn “A Mission to Decorate Life” The Fine Art Society London

Munchenberg, A, 1991 The British Collection at Carrick Hill The Carrick Hill Trust Springfield, South Australia

Treble, R , 1980 The art of Frank Brangwyn Burlington Magazine 122 p 447

Thomas D 1991 The British Collection at Carrick Hill The Carrick Hill Trust Springfield, South Australia

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