Abstract
This chapter illustrates the versatility which set Frank Brangwyn apart from many of his contemporaries. His realism made his work especially effective for posters and publications encouraging recruitment and promoting war charities. Brangwyn’s refusal to idealize the fighting forces and to ignore the horrors of war underpinned his activism during the First World War, one of his chief achievements being the practical and financial support of Belgian refugee artists.
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Notes
- 1.
The phrase ‘La Belgique telle qu’elle était’ recurs in the book’s introduction, written by Paul Lambotte, Director-General of Fine Arts in the Belgian Ministry of Arts and Sciences and effectively the voice of Belgian culture in Britain during the war years.
- 2.
The Fall of Ostend: La Gare Maritime and The Fall of Ostend: the Digue during the Embarkation of the Naval Division for Antwerp are two of a set of nine lithographs by Spencer Pryse, collectively entitled The Autumn Campaign, which were issued in a small edition in 1915 and exhibited in London. The quotation is from the artist’s own note on the set: http://www.campbell-fine-art.com/artists.php?id=240. I am grateful to Christophe Declercq for drawing my attention to Spencer Pryse’s work.
- 3.
What Brangwyn thought of the work of Britain’s official war artists is unclear. Living in Sussex from late 1917, he probably did not see the exhibitions of paintings by Paul Nash and others held in London in 1918. But he was dismissive of younger English artists in general: writing to his friend R.H. Kitson in Sicily, he remarked that ‘not one of them has risen to the great occasion’ of the war. To judge from two prints produced by Brangwyn towards the end of the war—a linocut of marching soldiers and a large lithograph of the desolated landscape of the Western Front—only the work of Nevinson and Nash seems to have impressed him more favourably and to have influenced his own work (Horner 2014a: 18, 20, 124, 128).
- 4.
http://abbottandholder-thelist.co.uk/brangwyn/, accessed 15 May 2016. For Brangwyn’s reliance on photography more generally, see Horner 2006: 193 f.; Horner and Naylor 2006: 44, 119 f., 172; Horner 2014a: 19, 20, 34, 53, 151, 154.
- 5.
I am grateful to Dr. Libby Horner, who from her transcripts of Brangwyn’s unpublished correspondence generously provided me with extracts referring to his collaboration with Verhaeren.
- 6.
Mansell Jones, later Professor of French at Bangor, travelled with Verhaeren on his tour, introducing him and translating for him at his lectures.
- 7.
The illustrated edition of Les campagnes hallucinées followed in 1927, again published by Helleu and Sergent. Some of Brangwyn’s illustrations to this later volume are reproduced in the exhibition catalogue 100 jaar ‘Les campagnes hallucinées’: Brangwyn, een illustrator voor Verhaeren, Sint-Amands-aan-de-Schelde: Provinciaal Museum Emile Verhaeren, 1993.
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Dunthorne, H. (2018). A Cambro-Belgian in the Great War: Frank Brangwyn as Artist and Activist. In: Rash, F., Declercq, C. (eds) The Great War in Belgium and the Netherlands. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73108-7_9
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