Albany Fine Art : Biography of Hercules Brabazon BRABAZON NEAC, PS

Hercules Brabazon BRABAZON NEAC, PS

British 1821-1906

Hercules Brabazon

Hercules Brabazon Brabazon
by John Singer Sargent
© National Portrait Gallery, London

"A country gentleman, who at seventy years old made his debut as a professional artist, and straightaway became famous" - by creating some of the most vibrant and spontaneous watercolours of the 19thC

Hercules Brabazon Brabazon was born Hercules Brabazon Sharpe in Paris in 1821 into an aristocratic family with estates in England and Ireland, the younger son of Hercules Sharpe of County Durham and Ann Brabazon of County Mayo, Ireland, and the nephew of Sir William Brabazon, Bart, of Brabazon Park, County Mayo, Ireland.

His family returned to England in 1832 and settled at their new estate, Oaklands, built for them by Decimus Burton, near Sedlescombe in East Sussex. Following a traditional upper class education at Dr Hooker’s preparatory school and an unhappy time at Harrow, Sharpe was sent off to the École Privat in Geneva. In 1840 he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, to read Mathematics (itself an unusual subject for a future artist), from which he graduated in 1844.

His father wanted his son to follow in the family tradition and read law in order to become a barrister (on a very generous personal allowance) but Brabazon flouted his father’s wishes, choosing instead to study in Rome on the much-reduced allowance of a ‘younger son’. For the next three years he studied art at the Accademia Nazionale di San Lucca and music at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia and looked forward to an artistic career, although he deplored the idea that he would need to sell his paintings in order to supplement his modest private income.

In 1847 everything changed with his older brother William’s unexpected death from fever in Malta. Suddenly he found himself heir to the Brabazon estates (in County Galway and County Roscommon, and Brabazon Park at Swinford in County Mayo) and a wealthy man, able to pursue his art wherever and however he pleased. (It was a stipulation under the terms of the will of his uncle, Sir William Brabazon, Bart, that he was required to change his surname from Sharpe to Brabazon and, unsurprisingly perhaps, he decided this was a price he was willing to pay).

In 1848, Brabazon left Rome and returned to England via Sicily and Gibraltar, travelling through Spain on horseback. It was on this journey that he first encountered the work of Velázquez (Spanish, 1599-1660) who became, and remained, his artistic inspiration, after JMW Turner (British, 1775-1851) whose works, and particularly the colour studies, Brabazon had carefully studied at the British Museum and deeply admired.

With the death of his father in 1858, Brabazon also inherited the family estates at Oaklands in Sussex and Blackhalls Manor in County Durham. He lived in Sussex, and later London, and arranged for his brother-in-law, Major Harvey Combe, to manage his estates so that he could devote himself to painting. He did so for the next 50 years, as an enthusiastic gentleman amateur, painting whenever he chose, giving his work away to favoured friends, never thinking of selling them and hating the idea of exhibiting.

He travelled widely, painting constantly: from 1860 to Cairo, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Baalbeck and Istanbul, before returning to London in 1864 to take up residence in an apartment at 2 Morpeth Terrace, Westminster. Thereafter he would spend his summers in London and Sussex and his winters in the Mediterranean or further afield – making the first of three Nile tours to the borders of Egypt and Sudan in 1868, travelling to India in 1870 and again in 1875 and, in 1880, accompanying John Ruskin (British, 1819-1900), Arthur Severn (British, 1842-1931) and Arthur Ditchfield (British, 1842-1883) on a sketching tour of Amiens in France. He particularly loved Venice and often visited and painted there, sometimes in the company of John Singer Sargent (American, 1856-1925), the most successful portrait painter of his era as well as a gifted landscape painter and watercolourist.

Brabazon's charmed lifestyle was nicely described in Thoughts from HBB written by a friend in 1879, “I live in London at times, then comes a dull day, murky, I shudder, I seize a carpet bag, I pack in it a paint box, a sketching block, a dozen of Chinese white, a shirt, a pocket handkerchief, a Beethoven a Brahms and a Chopin, I stuff them into the bag, I rush downstairs into a hansom, "Where to Sir?", "To Egypt", he understands and drives me straight to Charing Cross".

Although he had studied in Rome and later briefly with James d'Egville (British, 1840-1878) and Alfred Downing Fripp (British, 1822-1895), it can be said that he was largely self-taught. He first started painting his characteristic atmospheric and impressionistic watercolours and pastels in the 1860s and, though at first he appeared to be ‘just a gentleman amateur’, his unique talent was soon recognised by John Ruskin and, in 1867, he was elected a member of the Burlington Fine Arts Club at the same time as Dante Gabriel Rossetti (British, 1828-1882) and Ruskin himself.

Brabazon first met John Singer Sargent in 1885, they became good friends, and Sargent was so inspired by Brabazon’s work as to start experimenting with watercolour himself. But it would take Sargent another six years before he finally succeeded in persuading Brabazon to join the New English Art Club (NEAC) where he very reluctantly agreed to exhibit his work publicly for the first time, showing two paintings in the 1891 Winter Exhibition and a further two paintings in the Spring Exhibition of 1892.

On the strength of this Brabazon was invited to hold his first one-man exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in Bond Street, London, a few months later (1892), for which Sargent wrote the preface to the catalogue. Even up to the very last minute, however, Brabazon tried to cancel the exhibition and it was only as a result of a series of frantic telegrams with Sargent that he eventually agreed the exhibition should go ahead on the following day.

The exhibition was a great critical and commercial success, indeed a ‘sell-out’, and was especially championed by such younger artists as Sargent and Philip Wilson Steer (British, 1860-1942) as well as by DS MacColl, the Keeper of the Tate Gallery, who greatly admired Brabazon’s work. In a now famous quotation, Sir Frederick Wedmore, one of the most influential art critics of his day, said that Brabazon was "a country gentleman, who at seventy years old made his debut as a professional artist, and straightaway became famous".

Brabazon’s success did not make the slightest difference to him and he continued to describe himself modestly as an “enthusiastic amateur”, painting entirely for his own pleasure and living "for art and sunshine". In a 1913 review of his artistic legacy, however, Haldane Macfall, arguably the most famous art historian of his day, astutely observed that, “Criticism…has found Brabazon to be the ‘perfect amateur’, Turner the ‘perfect professional’…there is no such thing as a professional or amateur in art. A man is an artist or he is not…(and) no man could have been less amateur than Brabazon…”.

He held further one-man exhibitions at the Goupil Gallery in 1894, 1898 and 1899, the same year that he became a founder member of the Pastel Society (PS), with John McLure Hamilton (American, 1853-1936) describing him as “that clever artist who knew how to breathe on to paper in puffs of coloured smoke the most charming skies and lakes, and mountains and Venetian palaces”.

Brabazon anticipated the future direction of painting by creating some of the most vibrant and spontaneous watercolours of the 19thC. His work succeeded in symbolising visual impressions in the most economical way: it has been said that “he combined the atmospheric effects of JMW Turner with the deliciously suggestive brush and colour sense of Richard Parkes Bonington. Nothing is ever laboured or ‘finished’ in Brabazon. He usually completed a painting in about an hour, often in less time than that, utilising the impressionistic resources of watercolour to catch the image in a heartbeat of light.”

Brabazon was a gregarious and much-loved man, with a great gift for friendship, and his social circle encompassed many of the leading figures in the worlds of music and painting, including Franz Liszt, the composer, with whom he would play the piano, John Singer Sargent, and Joseph Severn, the British Consul in Rome, and the father of his lifelong friend, Arthur Severn.

Declining health forced Brabazon to retire to his home at Oaklands in 1904 where he worked on a catalogue of his work. He held two further exhibitions: a final one-man show at the Goupil Gallery in 1905 and exhibiting at the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers in 1906. He died at the height of his success in 1906 and is buried at his home in Sussex.

Brabazon never married and bequeathed his estates and art to members of his family. They decided to sell his artistic legacy and, in studio sales at Christie's (1926 and 1927) and Sotheby’s(1928), the vast quantity of 3,199 works was sold. This was a striking endorsement of his reputation and appeal but a decision that was to depress the value of his work for decades to come and from which they have only begun to recover in recent years.