Frank Bramley: (1857–1915)

Frank Bramley RA NEAC (6 May 1857 – 9 August 1915) was an English post-impressionist painter of the Newlyn School. He was a member of the RA and one of the founding members of the New English Art Club in 1886.

 Bramley was born in Sibsey, near Boston, Lincolnshire. From 1873 to 1878, he studied at the Lincoln School of Art, then from 1879 to 1882 at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, where Charles Verlat was his instructor. He lived in Venice from 1882 to 1884 and then moved to Newlyn, Cornwall. Bramley married fellow artist Katherine Graham in 1891.

Having returned to England from Venice in or after 1884, Bramley established himself in the Newlyn School artist colony on Rue des Beaux Arts in Newlyn. 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. This painting is held by the Tate Gallery after having been purchased for the nation by the Chantrey Bequest and is one of Bramley's most favoured works. Praised by the Royal Academy, Penlee House also appreciate this Bramley work: "The painting’s strong emotional and narrative content, together with its aesthetic appeal and tonal harmony, make this one of the most admired Newlyn School works to this day."

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.