PART VII: ART Fine Art 31 Frank Brangwyn (1867–1956): The Japanese Connection LIBBY HORNER Frank Brangwyn WORLD RENOWN Frank Brangwyn was one of the fi rst British artists to gain a world- wide reputation, his works being collected not only in Europe but also in Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, South Africa and the USA, and he was the recipient of numerous honours and awards, mainly from foreign countries. The following examples indicate the esteem in which he was held throughout his artistic career. Siegfried Bing chose Brangwyn, rather than a leading French artist, to decorate the exterior of his Galeries l’Art Nouveau in Paris in 1895. Together with such luminaries as Alphonse Mucha, Auguste Rodin and J.A. McNeill Whistler, Brangwyn was invited to take part in the fi rst exhibition organized by the avant-garde Vienna Secession in 1898. Brangwyn designed six stained glass panels for Louis Comfort Tiffany in 1899, one of which, Child Picking Gourds, was installed in the sitting room of Tiffany’s home, Laurelton House – a tremendous accolade. A huge exhibition of Brangwyn’s work was organized by Barbizon House at 184 Queen’s Gate, London, in 1924, which had the distinction of being 420 FRANK BRANGWYN (1867–1956) the fi rst ever art exhibition to be opened by a British Prime Minister, in this case Ramsey MacDonald. Brangwyn was one of three artists chosen by Nelson Rockefeller to decorate the concourse of the RCA Building, Rockefeller Plaza, New York (1930–34) the other two artists being Diego Rivera and José Maria Sert. In 1952 the Royal Academy in London held its fi rst ever retrospective of a living artist in Brangwyn’s honour which, in typically modest manner, the artist maintained was ‘very kind of them but very silly to show it after L[eonardo] di [sic] Vinci as it will be like showing a grain of dust after a feast of pineapples and grapes?’1 STRONG WORK ETHIC Brangwyn was born in Bruges, Belgium on 12 May 1867, the third of six children of William Curtis Brangwyn and Eleanor Griffi ths. William, who worked as an architect and designed stained glass, reli- gious artefacts and furniture, moved his family back to London in 1874. Brangwyn is not thought to have had any schooling beyond the age of eleven and certainly had no formal art training, which makes his subsequent successes all the more astounding. However it is per- tinent that his three mentors were also three of the most infl uential men in the design world at the turn of the century: Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo, William Morris and Siegfried Bing. From an early age Brangwyn sketched endlessly and was ‘discovered’ as a teenager by Mackmurdo who, in 1882, was instrumental in gaining employment for the young lad in Morris’ Queen Square workshops. Brangwyn worked there intermittently over a period of years although he found his task of squaring and enlarging designs absolutely tedious. The two guiding principles throughout Brangwyn’s life were lessons learnt from Mackmurdo and Morris: a strong work ethic and the value of drawing from nature. The Queen Square apprenticeship also taught Brangwyn many valuable lessons – he learnt to express himself graphically with economy; his later murals relied on the skill of squaring and enlarging drawings; he became adept at auto-plagiarism; he was modest about his achievements, regarding art as an occupation rather than a vocation; he had a business-like approach to his commissions; and the political activities of Morris may have infl uenced Brangwyn’s frequent depic- tion of agricultural and industrial labourers. Although Mackmurdo and Morris were both involved with decorative arts, Brangwyn confi ned himself to painting and drawing before he met Bing. It would appear to be the latter who recognized the young man’s latent talents, pre- sented him with new challenges, and made him realize his potential as a polymath, a quintessential artist-craftsman. In 1952 Clifford Musgrave estimated that Brangwyn had produced over 12,000 works, in a variety of media, including murals (over 421.