Frank Brangwyn or François Guillaume Brangwyn was born in Bruges in 1867 to Anglo-Welsh parents. His father, William Curtis Brangwyn had relocated to Belgium to pursue his career in ecclesiastical architecture, having previously worked in the London offices of George Edmund Street. In Bruges he set up his own workshop predominantly designing textiles for the church. In 1875 Curtis Brangwyn moved his family back to London where he settled into the studio of Sir Horace Jones.

From a very young age Frank Brangwyn had assisted in the creation of his father’s textile designs and after a short period of study at the South Kensington School, his work attracted the attention of Harold Rathbone and Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo who introduced him to William Morris. Morris requested that the young Brangwyn make for him facsimiles of Flemish tapestries, and so impressed was he by the results that he was to employ the fifteen year old for three years as an assistant in his Oxford Street workshop. Brangwyn’s work for Morris was exacting: enlarging designs, tracing drawings onto cloth and then transferring them to silk was a skill which demanded confidence and absolute accuracy, there was no room for mistake or revision. This confidence appears to be a natural instinct in Brangwyn, an instinct which was to prevail throughout his prolific and versatile career.

Brangwyn was never destined to be an assistant for long and even while still working for Morris & Co he discovered his great passion for the sea and for travel. Over the next decade his journeys took him across the world: Syria, Palestine, Algeria, Morocco, Tunis, Spain. For much of the time he worked his way around the globe; in 1888 he was employed on a freighter for passage to Istanbul and the Black Sea.

Brangwyn developed a deep understanding of the sea and those who worked with her and from this period comes a powerful group of dramatic seascape paintings.

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