Brickdale, Eleanor Fortescue (1872-1945) - The Introduction

The Introduction by Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale depicts a young lady meeting some pixies.

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Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale (1872-1945) was a British artist, a late exponent of Pre-Raphaelitism. 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 1872 in Upper Norwood, Surrey. 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 and won a prize for a design for a lunette, Spring, for the dining-room of the academy. 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.

While at the academy, Fortescue-Brickdale came under the influence of John Byam Shaw, a protégé of John Everett Millais much influenced by John William Waterhouse. When Byam Shaw founded his art school in 1910, Fortescue-Brickdale became a teacher there.

In 1909, 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 1911, and twenty-four of them were published the following year in a deluxe edition of the first four Idylls.

She also made designs for stained glass windows for churches and religious institutions, of which two were published in The Studio in 1900; her earliest surviving window dates from 1912. 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.

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

Fortescue-Brickdale was an associate member of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours from 1901, and was elected to full membership in 1919; she was elected to the Royal Institute of Oil Painters in 1902, its earliest female member. She exhibited at the first exhibition of the Society of Graphic Art in 1921. Her 1921 World War I memorial to the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry is in York Minster.

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, and is buried at Brompton Cemetery, London.