Frank Brangwyn
Frank Brangwyn was born of English parents in 1867 in Bruges, where he grew up and acquired a strong feel for the local people and culture, before his parents moved back to England in 1874.
Brangwyn had no formal training as an artist, though his father, an architect, encouraged his artistic leanings. When he was still in his teens he was ‘discovered’ by the artist Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo, who recommended him to the William Morris workshops. Here he proved a keen student and absorbed Morris’s gospel that an artist should seek to beautify all aspects of life.
Brangwyn was a prodigiously talented jack-of-all-trades and began winning competitions and exhibiting as young as 17, going on to build a reputation as not only a painter but the creator and decorator of stained glass, furniture, ceramics, table glassware, buildings and interiors, as a lithographer and book illustrator.
The Great War
At the start of the First World War, more than a million Belgian refugees fled the advancing German armies and some 250,000 came to England – one of the largest groups of refugees this country has ever received. Local relief committees formed all over the country, raising funds for the exiles.
‘Britain’s Call to Arms’ by Frank Branwyn
War posters
Brangwyn almost immediately joined in this relief effort by designing posters aimed at publicising the plight of the refugees and raising money for them. This small exhibition at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, north London, takes its title from a poster he made for the Belgian & Allies Aid League titled, ‘Will you help these sufferers from the war to start a new home: Help is better than sympathy’.
‘The Retreat from Antwerp’ poster by Frank Brangwyn, lithograph 1915-1916: copyright David Brangwyn
Civilian suffering
Brangwyn was so prolific that the style and design of his posters became virtually synonymous with First World War propaganda. Though patriotic in tone they aren’t as sanitised or simplistic as many other WWI posters. The figures aren’t heroic, if anything they are often rather grotesque and gargoyle-like.
As with much popular art of the period the images are made of strong, thick lines, confidently sketched in a bold extrovert style but with an unusual intensity of light and shade, of chiaroscuro, which gives them a tremendous dramatic immediacy.
Brangwyn didn’t become an official War Artist when that scheme was set up, and so never actually visited the Front; his subject was the destruction war wreaked on Belgium’s historic buildings and the suffering of innocent civilians.
The zeppelin raids: the vow of vengeance’, drawn for The Daily Chronicle by Frank Brangwyn
The final blow
Wars tend to get more violent and more pitiless the longer they go on and the longer your enemy stubbornly refuses to give in and surrender. Who, at the start of World War II, would have believed the virtuous Allies capable of firebombing Hamburg or dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima? The Great War is one of the horrible proofs of this rule – by the fourth and final year the mood on both sides was bitter and unforgiving.
This is the background to the most notorious poster, Put strength into the final blow, which depicts an Allied soldier bayoneting a German in the neck. Legend has it that the image was so incendiary that the German Kaiser put a price on Brangwyn’s head – but it was also criticised here in Blighty for its bloodthirstiness.
‘Put strength in the final blow’ by Frank Brangwyn (1918)
Frank Brangwyn at the William Morris Gallery
The exhibition is being held here at the William Morris Gallery because Brangwyn never forgot his debt to the Morris workshop for starting his career. He sympathised with Morris’s visionary aims, that the artist should be a craftsman capable in multiple mediums and should make art to beautify all aspects of life. Thus, when Brangwyn heard that the museum was being set up to promote Morris’s life and work, he donated a number of works to help it get started. As a result the WMG holds the second largest collection of Brangwyn’s work in England, after the British Museum. This explains why numerous other, non-war-related works of his, are hung in other rooms and corridors around the museum, including the wonderful Swans (1921).
Related links
- Help is better than sympathy: Frank Brangwyn and the First World War continues at the William Morris Gallery until 14 September.
- Frank Brangwyn at the William Morris Museum
- The War page of the Frank Brangwyn website
- Frank Brangwyn on Wikipedia
Reviews of William Morris
- Frank Brangwyn and the First World War @ William Morris Gallery (July 2014)
- The Lesser Arts by William Morris (1877)
- The Art of the People by William Morris (1879)
- The Beauty of Life by William Morris (1880)
- Useful Work versus Useless Toil by William Morris (1884)
- The hopes of civilisation by William Morris (1885)
- News from Nowhere by William Morris (1890)
- William Morris by Christine Poulson
Books & Boots 
Olive Malcolm
/ February 10, 2021I have a large original Brangwyn WW1 poster in excellent condition of a rescue lifeboat: “Help Your Country Stop This Join the Navy.” Let me know if you are interested.