British artist (–)
Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale (25 January – 10 March ) was a British artist, a late exponent of Pre-Raphaelitism.[1] She produced paintings in oils and watercolour, book illustrations, and a number of designs for works in stained glass.
Mary Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, daughter of Matthew and Sarah Fortescue Brickdale, was born 25 January at her parents' house, Birchamp Villa in Upper Norwood, Surrey.[2] 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 In that year she also exhibited a work at the Royal Academy, and won a prize for a design for a lunette, Spring, for the dining-room of the academy.[3] 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.[4]
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.[4] When Byam Shaw founded his art school in , Fortescue-Brickdale became a teacher there.
In , Ernest Brown, of the Leicester Galleries, commissioned a series of twenty-eight watercolour illustrations to Tennyson's Idylls of the King, which Fortescue-Brickdale painted over two years. They were exhibited at the gallery in , and twenty-four of them were published the following year in a deluxe edition of the first four Idylls.[4]
She also made designs for stained glass windows for churches and religious institutions, of which two were published in The Studio in ; her earliest surviving window dates from [5] The actual stained-glass work was done by an associate, Harry Grylls. Many of these designs were for memorials, particularly in the aftermath of the First World War.[5]
She lived during much of her career in Holland Park Road, opposite Leighton House, where she held an exhibition in [4]
Fortescue-Brickdale was an associate member of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours from , and was elected to full membership in ; she was elected to the Royal Institute of Oil Painters in , its earliest female member.[2][6] She exhibited at the first exhibition of the Society of Graphic Art in [7] Her World War I memorial to the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry is in York Minster.[8]
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 ,[9][10] and is buried at Brompton Cemetery, London.[11]
Love and his Counterfeits,
The Uninvited Guest,
They toil not, neither do they spin
The introduction
Riches