Frank Bramley (1857 - 1915)

Frank Bramley

Frank Bramley was an English post-impressionist genre painter of the Newlyn School. Bramley studied at the Lincoln School of Art. He then studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. He lived in Venice from 1882 to 1884 and then moved to Cornwall and established himself in the Newlyn School artist colony on Rue des Beaux Arts. Along with Walter Langley and Stanhope Forbes, he was considered to be one of the "leading figures" of the Newlyn School. In contrast to other members of the Newlyn school, Bramley specialised in interiors and worked on combining natural and artificial light in his paintings, such as A Hopeless Dawn. During his time in Newlyn, Bramley was a particular exponent of the ‘square brush technique’, using the flat of a square brush to lay the paint on the canvas in a jigsaw pattern of brush strokes, giving a particular vibrancy to the paint surface. In the early 1890s, his palette became brighter and his handling of the paint looser and more impastoed, while his subject matter narrowed to portraits and rural genre paintings. In 1894 Bramley became an Associate of the Royal Academy (ARA) and in 1911 he became a Royal Academician (RA). He was also a gold medal winner at the Paris Salon.

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