Posted on: 29 March 2014

Hercules Brabazon Brabazon (British, 1821-1906)

Jodhpur, Rajputana, India watercolour
14.6 x 21.6 cm. (5 3/4 x 8 1/2 in.)

English watercolourist. Baptised Hercules Brabazon Sharpe, the son of landed gentry, he inherited the family estates in 1847 and 1858, which occasioned a legal change in his surname. From that date Brabazon dedicated himself to watercolour, living in Sussex during part of the year and travelling annually on the Continent, especially to the Alps and the Mediterranean. He also visited Africa, India and the Middle East in the 1860s and 1870s and produced thousands of landscapes during his career. Brabazon studied briefly with James D'Egville (d 1880) and Alfred Downing Fripp (1822–95), but he was largely a self-taught amateur, learning from his contemporaries and from the Old Masters, particularly Velázquez, whose works he copied. His broad style is closest to early 19th-century plein-air painters. Ruskin and D. S. MacColl praised Brabazon as Turner's rival as a colourist. Brabazon's watercolours link the impressionistic fluid technique of early 19th-century painters to the work of progressive English artists of the fin-de-siècle, influenced by Whistler and the French.
Brabazon was little known publicly until his first exhibition with the New English Art Club in 1891. His young admirers championed his one-man exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in 1892. He had several more one-man shows there and was a member of the New English Art Club and the Pastel Society.
(Source: Tate,London)

Image source: Bonhams


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Hercules Brabazon Brabazon 1893 Hercules Brabazon Brabazon (1821-1906) was an Irish/English watercolorist who came to it professionally at a late age -- though he had been a gentleman artist for many years previously. He held his first one-man exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in 1892 at the age of 71 quickly became a sensation with works such as "The Pink Palace". Sargent, Philip Wilson Steer, and D. S. MacColl, his friends from the New English Art Club, were all wildly supportive of this "new kid's" first solo exhibition. Sir Frederick Wedmore described him as being: 'A country gentleman, who at seventy years old made his debut as a professional artist, and straightaway became famous.' Although thirty years older than Sargent, the two shared a lot in common and they became good friends. Brabazon first exhibited at the New English Art Club in '91. He was raised in France, developed a love of music and traveled widely spending his summers in the Riviera and traveled through North Africa and the Middle East. To put into perspective the affection Sargent had for this man and the painting -- this was in Sargent's personal collection when he died in 1925 - twenty-five years after it was painted.[1] Brabazon's watercolors, such as "Fondamenta della Salute" and "Venice (3)" showed the deftness of what Whistler had done and in many ways the same sort of things Sargent himself was doing. Sargent admired him greatly and at the time of his own death held works by Brabazon in his own collection. Born Hercules Brabazon Sharpe, the youngest of two sons from an Irish aristocratic family which held estates in both Ireland and Britain he was able to enjoy a life of the intellect, arts and leisure. Upon the early death of his older brother ('47) and then his father in '58 when he was thirty-seven years old, he inherited the title and fortune of the family and became Hercules Brabazon Brabazon. Early on, after his father brought the family back to England, he studied watercolors at Harrow and then mathematics at Trinity College. When Sargent paints him, Hecules would have been 79 years old. Source: http://www.jssgallery.org

Excellent Portrait.

nice