Sheer Pleasure: Frank Brangwyn and the Art of Japan @ the William Morris Gallery

Frank Brangwyn

Frank Brangwyn was born to English parents in Bruges in 1867 and spent his childhood there soaking up a stylish continental atmosphere and the feel of his father’s design workshop. In 1874 the Brangwyns moved back to England where young Frank used to skive off school to hang round his father’s London workshop or go sketching at the V&A. In his teens Brangwyn was ‘discovered’ by the artist Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo, who recommended him to the William Morris workshops. Here he proved an outstanding student and developed advanced skills not only in the fine arts but in practical crafts like ceramics, the design of furniture, fabrics and stained glass windows.

As his career went from strength to strength in the 1890s and 1900s, Brangwyn never forgot his debt to Morris or Morris’s basic tenet that art should be for everybody. When he heard that a William Morris Gallery was being set up in Morris’s childhood home, the grand Georgian mansion Water House in Walthamstow in the 1930s, Brangwyn enthusiastically supported the project and donated a sizeable number of works his own oeuvre and from his private collections – with the result that the WMG holds the second largest collection of Brangwyn’s work in England, after the British Museum.

Music (1895) by Frank Brangwyn

And which is why the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow is celebrating the 150th anniversary of Brangwyn’s birth with a small but lovely selection of his works. The curators have chosen to focus on Brangwyn’s lifelong enthusiasm for Japanese art, which comes in about five forms:

1. Brangwyn’s collection of classic Japanese woodprints

Brangwyn himself made a notable collection of the Japanese woodprints which became so fashionable in western Europe from the 1850s onwards. So we have a dozen or so Victorian prints of classic Japanese woodprints, including Mount Fuji by Hokusai, one of the Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō by Hiroshige, a courtesan by Gakutei, a half dozen prints depicting the ‘floating world’ or ukyo-e by Utigara Kumisada, and a couple of ‘pillar prints’, slender portrait size subjects.

Simplified View, Tago Beach, [near] Ejiri on the Tokaido Highway by Katsushika Hokusai (c. 1830–1834)

These are priceless, inspiring examples of the delicacy and atmosphere of classic Japanese woodprints.

Pictures of the floating world by Utigara Kumisada

2. Woodblock prints

In 1917 Brangwyn collaborated with the Japanese artist Yoshijiro Urushibara on a series of woodblock prints. Brangwyn had already made etchings or watercolours of the subjects and the exhibition goes into some detail on the technicalities of creating one of these woodprints, with a number of preparatory studies showing how they were built up a layer at a time. The results are wonderfully atmospheric, combining Brangwyn’s own strengths as a terrific draughtsman with the spooky delicacy of the Japanese sensibility.

Bruges by night by Frank Brangwyn & Yoshijiro Urushibara

3. Ceramics 

There are several display cases showing a number of ceramics, pots, ashtrays, cups and saucers. I don’t feel qualified to evaluate these, as I have little or no feeling for this kind of thing.

4. Exhibitions

There is a poster for the 1910 Anglo-Japanese Exhibition which ran for 6 months in London and influenced wider taste for all things Japanese. Through his extensive collecting Brangwyn became friends with the Japanese shipping magnate Kojiro Matsukata. Brangwyn was commissioned by Matsukata to design a massive art gallery to be built in Tokyo, to be called The Sheer Pleasure Art Pavilion (hence the title of this exhibition). On display are some of Brangwyn’s detailed architect drawings which make it look vast and sleek in a very Art Deco style. Sadly, Tokyo was hit by an earthquake, followed by an economic crash. Matsukata’s business ran into trouble, the gallery was never built, and his enormous collection was dismantled and sold off.

Courtesan by Yashima Gakutei

5. His own works

There are three massive oil colours on display, two by Brangwyn – Music (the first image in this blog post, above) was commissioned in 1895 by the Parisian art dealer Siegfried Bing to decorate the exterior of his Galerie L’Art Nouveau in Paris; and The Swans, his 1921 masterpiece. I love the firmness of line and design, as well as the wonderful depiction of spots of daylight through foliage and the brilliantly colourful orange nasturtiums. Strong outlines and bright gaudy dappled colouring.

• The Swans (1921)

There’s also a big portrait of Brangwyn himself, painted by his friend James Kerr-Lawson. Note the big Japanese screen behind him. This is also included in the exhibition and is a beautiful work in its own right.

• Sir Frank Brangwyn by James Kerr-Lawson

Conclusion

So it’s a smallish show but full of beautiful things, wonderful prints and paintings you would just love to own and hang on your own walls. And after all this mental globetrotting to Tokyo and Paris and so on, it is quite ironic that arguably the most haunting and effective piece in the show is titled Bournemouth by moonlight.

Bournemouth, moonlight (1928) by Yoshijiro Urushibara

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Related links

• Sheer Pleasure: Frank Brangwyn and the Art of Japan @ continues at the William Morris Gallery until 14 May 2017
• Frank Brangwyn at the William Morris Museum
• The Frank Brangwyn website
• Frank Brangwyn Wikipedia article

Other William Morris-related reviews

• 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

Posted by Simon on May 6, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/05/06/sheer-pleasure-frank-brangwyn-and-the-art-of-japan-the-william-morris-gallery/