Red Hair in Art: Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale (1872 - 1945) was an English artist known for her paintings, book illustrations, and a number of works in stained glass.

She was trained first at the Crystal Palace School of Art, under Herbert Bone and entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1896. 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 Liston Shaw, a protégé of John Everett Millais.

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.

Fortescue-Brickdale 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.

The Forerunner

Time the Physician

Today for Me

Youth and the Lady

Kate Barlass

Idylls of the King (Vivien)

Idylls of the King

(O master do you love my tender rhyme)

Idylls of the King (Guinevere)

Riches

The Introduction