Frank Bramley

An English Post-impressionist artist, one of the major representatives and “leading figures” of the Newlyn School art group, a co-founder of the New English Art Club.

Bramley received his education at the Lincoln School of Art and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. His teacher was a famous Belgian academic artist, Charles Verlat.

The works of Frank Bramley were exhibited for almost 30 years (since 1884) at the annual exhibitions of the Royal Academy of Arts and acquired by the best galleries in the UK.

Key ideas:

– Unlike other members of the Newlyn school, Bramley specialized not in plein air painting, but in genre scenes depicting interiors. He set himself a task of harmoniously combining the natural and artificial lightning. Preferred to work more in the studio than outdoors.

– Another feature of Frank Bramley was the use of the “square brush” technique in the work, when the artist takes a flat brush to make strokes on the canvas in the form of a mosaic pattern. A vivid example of the use of this technique can be his painting “Domino!”.

– The painter put, along with narrative, a strong emotional content in his paintings. Together with aesthetic appeal and tonal harmony, emotion makes genre works truly alive and makes portraits deep.

– From the 1890s, the palette became brighter and lighter; the processing of paints became looser, while more saturated – like in the painting “Portrait of Helen Chalmers”, 1908. The themes of Bramley’s works are portraits and village genre paintings (traditional scenes from the life of ordinary villagers) and, more rarely, vivid landscapes such as “Thislemere Lake in Cumberland”.