Sir Frank Brangwyn – 'To decorate life'

An artistic polymath whose murals were revered around the world, Sir Frank Brangwyn ended his days as a recluse after a crushing rejection, reveals Matthew Dennison

- By Matthew Dennison

An artist's mission, wrote Frank Brangwyn in 1934, 'is to decorate life'. More than any other artist of his generation, Brangwyn, who died in 1956, practised what he preached. 'He must be able to turn his hand to everything... to make pots and pans, doors and walls, monuments or cathedrals, carve, paint and do everything asked of him,' he suggested and, in his own case, he did exactly that.

Brangwyn was prolific. He applied his talents to an extraordinary range of media, including ceramics for Royal Doulton and stained glass; he received commissions for book illustrations and, during the First World War, propaganda posters; he designed furniture, even complete interior schemes; and, when smoke pollution threatened his tempera murals based on the life of St Aidan for a church in Leeds, Brangwyn reworked his original designs in vitreous mosaic. Most of all, he painted. One estimate suggests he produced more than 12,000 works in a career that began at the age of 17, when, in 1884, his first painting was accepted for the Summer Exhibition of the Royal Academy.

In his lifetime, Brangwyn's reputation matched his colossal output. In 1910, Walter Shaw Sparrow saw the series of mural panels the artist had delivered to the Skinners' Company in London. Images on the six large and four smaller panels depicting 'the stir and colour of the long-drawn Pageant of the Guild' revealed, Shaw Sparrow wrote, 'such a breadth of vision, such a lyrical swing in design, such a superb virility in handling, as will ever be remarkable in the history of British art'.