Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale (25 January 1872 – 10 March 1945) was an English artist.

Life

Fortescue-Brickdale was born at her parents' house, Birchamp Villa[1] in Upper Norwood, Surrey as Mary Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale the daughter of Matthew and Sarah Fortescue Brickdale. Her father was a barrister. She was trained first at the Crystal Palace School of Art, under Herbert Bone and entered the Royal Academy in 1896. Her first major painting was The Pale Complexion of True Love (1899). She soon began exhibiting her oil paintings at the Royal Academy, and her watercolours at the Dowdeswell Gallery, where she had several solo exhibitions.[2]

While at the academy, she came under the influence of John Byam Liston Shaw, a protégé of John Everett Millais much influenced by John William Waterhouse.[2] When Byam Shaw founded an art school in 1911, Fortescue-Brickdale became a teacher there.

In 1909, Ernest Brown, of the Leicester Galleries, commissioned a series of 28 watercolour illustrations to Tennyson's Idylls of the King, which she painted over two years. They were exhibited in the gallery in 1911, and 24 of them were published the next year in a deluxe edition of the first four Idylls [2]

She lived during much of her career in Holland Park Road, opposite Leighton House, where she held an exhibition in 1904.[2]

Later, she also worked with stained glass. She was a staunch Christian, and donated works to churches. Amongst her best known works are The Uninvited Guest and Guinevere. She died on 10 March 1945,[3][4] and is buried at Brompton Cemetery, London.[5]
Works

The Uninvited Guest, 1906.

They toil not, neither do they spin

The introduction

Riches

Golden book of famous women (1919)

Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale's Golden book of famous women (1919) - cover.jpg

Intro

Héloïse and Abelard

Fair Rosamund

Dante and Beatrice

Laura and Petrarca

Joan of Arc

Catherine of Aragon

"Yestreen Queen Mary had four Maries, This night she'll hae but three; She had Mary Seaton, and Mary Beaton, And Mary Carmichael, and me" (Mary Hamilton)

Una and The Red Cross Knight

Bottom and Titania

Rosalind and Celia

Guinevere

Maud is only seventeen

Kate Barlass

Catherine of Siena

Clare of Assisi