Queen Elizabeth Going aboard the “Golden Hind”

Queen Elizabeth Going aboard the “Golden Hind” by Sir Frank Brangwyn RA RWS PRBA HRSA, 1867-1956. Tempera on panel. Lloyd's Register. Source: Sparrow, Frank Brangwyn and His Work, facing 132. [Click on image to enlarge it.]

Lloyd's Register on this site

Commentary by Walter Shaw Sparrow

As for the ten tempera paintings done for Lloyd's Registry, and shown first of all in a special room at the Ghent Exhibition, they were designed and carried out for a purpose so charged with difficulties that preparatory work needed unusual will-power. Imagine a very large room panelled with oak. It has a barrel roof and a top window. The roof, like a phase of decoration loved by our Henry III, true patron of the English Home, is bright with stars dappled on a lozenge moulding that is painted a deep and rich blue. At a height of some eight feet from the floor there are places for nine decorative paintings, all of the same size, about nine feet by five feet, and they draw our eyes towards a culminating point — a vast lunette, more than eighteen feet by ten feet. Brangwyn decided that he would fill his nine panels with workmen of various sorts, all in the midst of rich and happy colours, as when men gather grapes and pumpkins, or display rich carpets from the East; and that he would place behind them as much majestic plenty as he could suggest as a part of our commerce. His studies for all these things are most varied and apt, though we cannot say of them they are the most perfect expression of his emotion, his real artistic media. As regards the huge lunette, Brangwyn used it as a space upon which he could sum up with power the genius of mechanical industry, choosing for his motif the final stage in the making of a big ship's boiler. A blast furnace near at hand, a foreman explaining a plan to his assistants, other men in strong light hammering on iron bars, and a blue sky as a background also to the tall chimneys that mark what Victorians called a hive of industry. Some men on the boiler add height to the great central mass of the composition, and prevent it from being too horizontal in the arrangement of its planes. [26]

Formatting and caption by George P. Landow. You may use these images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the Internet Archive and the Ontario College of Art and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

Bibliography

Sparrow, Walter Shaw. Frank Brangwyn and His Work. New York: Dana Estes, 1911. Internet Archive version of a copy in the Ontario College of Art. Web. 29 December 2012.

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.


Last modified 12 June 2020