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Commentary by Walter Shaw Sparrow

Brangwyn is a master of scaffolding. To me his effects are better even than those of another master, Muirhead Bone, who is equally alert and wide-awake to the elusive architecture that tall and intricate scaffolds imply, and whose style is vivacious and meditative, if somewhat matter-of-fact. When Brangwyn shows how a bridge is built at Montauban, etching on a large plate direct from Nature (No. 221), or how the Victoria and Albert Museum looked in its embryonic stage [watercolor sketch for the etching], all the matter-of-fact goes up with huge scaffolds into rough poetry, and stress and strain of building enterprise are present with their weight and energy, their toilers and their mechanisms. And now we arrive at a deeply serious and meditated work, "A Coal Mine" (No. 59, 19 x 24 ¼ inches). There has been an explosion and colliers in two groups — one in shade, and one in vivid light — are bearing away a wounded comrade. Two tree-trunks, upright, tall and boldly modelled, grow between us and a fine pithead, one part of which rises like scaffolding around a tower. Smoke in soft waves resembling shredded tow, as if from huge torches, curls up to the pithead and licks around its timber. Behind is a uniform sky with a technique that does not appear in any other Brangwyn. It seems to have been scratched horizontally with a fine metal comb, then bitten by mild acid; and from this process comes a monotone sky that looks well in a tragic episode [127-28]

Bibliography

Sparrow, Walter Shaw. Prints and Drawings of Frank Brangwyn with Some Other Phases of His Art. London: John Lane, 1919. Internet Archive version of a copy in the Ontario College of Art. Web. 28 December 2012.

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Last modified 12 June 2020