Sir Frank Dicksee

FILLIN "Painter" \* MERGEFORMAT Sir Francis Bernard Dicksee PRA RI KCVO FILLIN "Dates" \* MERGEFORMAT 1853 - London - 1928 Sir Francis Bernard Dicksee was the most illustrious member of the Dicksee dynasty of painters. He specialised in portrait painting and genre subjects inspired by Late Romantic themes drawn from the medieval age. The brothers Dicksee, John Robert (1817-1905) and Thomas Francis (1819-1895) were important mid-nineteenth century portrait and genre painters. Thomas had three children, Sir Francis Bernard (1853-1928), Margaret Isabel (1858-1903) and Herbert Thomas (1862-1942) who each became important artists in their own right. Sir Francis Bernard Dicksee studied first with his father, before enrolling as a pupil at the Royal Academy Schools for five years. Dicksee also had an important career as an illustrator of books and periodical magazines. He made his start as an artist providing illustrations to the Graphic and the Cornhill Magazine. He also illustrated novels and books of poetry such as Mrs Oliphant’s Within the Precincts and the epic poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, including Evangeline and The Four Georges in the 1880s. Many leading contemporary artists were to have an influence upon Dicksee, most importantly the late Pre-Raphaelitism of Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones and George Frederick Watts. Like these painters, Dicksee adamantly rejected the modernity of industrial and mercantile Victorian Britain and sought to create a realm of archaising idealism in his works. Dicksee’s portraits of elegant contemporaries also strive after a mood of reverie and aesthetic beauty, while still conveying a vivid sense of the particular individual. Dicksee contrasted his social portraiture, which celebrates the elegance of the Edwardian era in a graceful manner comparable to the work of his contemporary John Singer Sargent, with a number of genre paintings moralising upon the life of modern-day high society, reminiscent of the works of Sir William Quiller Orchardson (1832-1910). Dicksee made his début at the Royal Academy in 1876. The next year he achieved the great honour of having one of his paintings, Harmony, purchased by the Chantrey Bequest, a fund set to purchase contemporary art of extraordinary merit for the Nation. Another of Dicksee’s paintings, The Magic Crystal, was also bought by the Chantrey Bequest. He also exhibited at the Royal Society of British Artists at the Suffolk Street Galleries in 1872 and 1874. He had an international reputation and was awarded a silver medal at the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1900. Dicksee was to be an important force within the Royal Academy throughout his long life. Having studied at the Royal Academy schools as a young man, he was elected an associate in 1881 and a member in 1891. Dicksee was elected President of the Royal Academy in 1924 when he was seventy-one years of age. These artistic honours were coupled with royal recognition; he was knighted in 1925. King George V awarded him the honour of being Knight Commander of the Victorian Order in 1927. The work of Sir Francis Bernard Dicksee is represented in many museum collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum and the Tate Gallery, London, the Manchester City Art Gallery, the Leicester City Art Gallery, the Newport City Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Wales, Cardiff and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. The Tate Gallery holds Harmony, an allegory of music, painting and poetry in the late Pre-Raphaelite manner which was purchased by the Chantrey Bequest in its collection.