Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale was an English illustrator, painter and watercolour artist of the Edwardian era. She represented the Romanticism art movement.
Background
Fortescue-Brickdale was born in Surrey, United Kingdom, on January 25, 1872, to an upper-class family. Her father, Matthew Inglett Brickdale, was a leading barrister. Her mother was Sarah Ann Brickdale (Fortescue). She was the youngest of their four children: two boys and two girls.
Education
When Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale was 17, she attended the Crystal Palace School of Art, Science, and Literature, where she studied under Herbert Bone. It took her three tries before she was accepted to the Royal Academy in 1896, perhaps due in part to that school’s reluctance to admit females.
Career
In 1899 Fortescue-Brickdale created her first major work, The Pale Complexion of True Love, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy. Fortescue-Brickdale exhibited forty-five watercolours at the Dowdeswell Galleries in London in 1901. Her works sold well, and she was able to buy her first studio, in Holland Park, not far from Leighton House, which had been the residence and studio of Frederic, Lord Leighton until his death in 1896. She held an exhibition in her studio in 1904.
In 1905 she illustrated Poems by Tennyson written by W.M. Canton. In 1909 Fortescue-Brickdale was commissioned by Ernest Brown, a represantative of the Leicester Galleries, to create a series of 28 watercolour illustrations to Tennyson's Idylls of the King. These illustrations were exhibited in 1911, and 24 of them were published the next year in a deluxe edition of the first four Idylls. When John Byam Liston Shaw founded an art school in 1911, Fortescue-Brickdale was offered a post of a teacher there.
During the 1920s, after she had produced her historical works The Forerunner (1920) and Botticelli’s Studio (1922), her eyesight began to fail, and her health started to worsen. Fortescue-Brickdale took part in the first exhibition of the Society of Graphic Art in 1921. She worked mostly on small watercolours, stained glass windows, and altarpieces.
Religion
Eleanor was a Christian, and frequently donated her works to churches.
Views
Fortescue-Brickdale was a campaigner for women’s rights.
Membership
In 1902 Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale became the first female member of the Institute of Painters in Oils.