Frank BRANGWYN

From around 1899 onwards Frank Brangwyn worked extensively on architectural and decorative projects for private interiors. The first scheme of this kind was a bedroom for the Australian art collector Edmund Davis at Lansdowne House in London’s Holland Park, for which Brangwyn planned and executed all of the decorative aspects of the interior, from the furniture to the marquetry inlay, the windows, the door catches and even the electric light switches. Among his later projects for interior decoration were the design of a room in the Palazzo Rezzonico in Venice for Baron Lionel Hirschel di Minerbi, which was never executed, and the dining room of the villa known as the Casa Cuseni in Taormina in Sicily, the home of the painter Robert Hawthorn Kitson. In all the artist designed some forty decorative schemes for interiors, of which around a quarter were realized. Each of Brangwyn’s interior designs of this type are characterized by similar themes, including the shared division of the space, with a dado of panelling and a decorative frieze crowning the architectural pattern of the room. As the Brangwyn scholar Libby Horner writes, Brangwyn ‘could successfully design complete and harmonious interiors and demonstrated a technical understanding of each discipline…The defining features of Brangwyn’s interiors are, in general, restrained backgrounds which acted as a foil to areas of decoration or paintings, line as the pre-eminent form of expression and the coordination of all aspects of furnishing, producing an aesthetic whole (Gesamtkunstwerk)…a unified interior.’

Datable to around 1900, this large sheet displays many of the characteristics of Brangwyn’s interior design practice, notably the use of wood (in this case apparently cedar) panelling and its division into squares and rectangles, the mottled tiles, and the insertion of a decorative enamel panel above the fireplace. It has been tentatively suggested that this drawing may represent a design for the interior of Temple Lodge, a late Georgian villa in the London borough of Hammersmith where Brangwyn took up residence in 1900, eventually building a large studio next door. A stylistically comparable design by Brangwyn for the wall of a billiard room for the firm of Thurston & Co., datable to c.1902, shared the same provenance from the collection of Edward Peacock.

The present sheet was part of a large and important group of drawings by Brangwyn, for the most part representing his varied work as a designer and decorator, which the artist bequeathed to Edgar Peacock, the son of his longstanding housekeeper in Ditchling in Sussex. These drawings remained completely unknown to collectors and scholars until their dispersal at auction in 2000, following Peacock’s death, and their rediscovery has since served to shed much new light on Brangwyn’s extensive output as a designer.