Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale


Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale was an English artist known for her paintings, book illustrations and for a number of works in stained glass.

Life

Fortescue-Brickdale was born at her parents' house, Birchamp Villa 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 Schools in 1896. In that year she also exhibited a work at the Royal Academy, RA, and won a prize for designing a lunette, Spring for the RA Dining Room. Her first major painting was The Pale Complexion of True Love . She soon began exhibiting her oil paintings at the Royal Academy, and her watercolours at the Dowdeswell Gallery, where she had several solo exhibitions.
While at the academy, Fortescue-Brickdale came under the influence of John Byam Liston Shaw, a protégé of John Everett Millais much influenced by John William Waterhouse. When Byam Shaw founded his 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 Fortescue-Brickdale painted over two years. They were exhibited at the gallery in 1911, and 24 of them were published the following year in a deluxe edition of the first four Idylls.
She lived during much of her career in Holland Park Road, opposite Leighton House, where she held an exhibition in 1904.
Fortescue-Brickdale exhibited at the first exhibition of the Society of Graphic Art in 1921.
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,"Obituary. Times 14 Mar. 1945: 7. The Times Digital Archive. Web. 30 Aug. 2013. and is buried at Brompton Cemetery, London.

Books illustrated

Golden book of famous women (1919)