Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale

Image of Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale in her studio. 

British artist Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale (1872-1945) was best known for her paintings, book illustrations, and stained glass. One of the pioneering women artists of her day, she trained at the Royal Academy, where she later exhibited some of her work. Elected as the first female member of the Institute of Painters in Oils, Brickdale became the first female associate member of the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours in 1902. Among the finest illustrators of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, she created twenty-one color illustrations that appeared in a 1911 edition of the first four published idylls (Enid, Vivien, Elaine, and Guinevere). She also produced other watercolors based on Tennyson, such as the depiction of Gareth working in the kitchen, which—though exhibited alongside her other Idylls watercolors at the Leicester Galleries—was not reproduced in that volume.

Displayed here are Merlin Finds the Baby Arthur, an original watercolor by Brickdale that appeared in The Idylls of the King (1911), and Gareth Working in the Kitchen, another of her original Arthurian watercolors (though not reproduced in the 1911 edition of the Idylls).