Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale: Illustrations to IDYLLS OF THE KING by Alfred Lord Tennyson

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale (1871 – 10 March 1945). She was an English artist. was born in Upper Norwood, Surrey as Mary Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale the daughter of Matthew and Sarah Fortescue Brickdale, her father was a barrister. She was trained first at the Cristal Palace School of Art, under Herbert Bone and entered the Royal Academy in 1896. Her first major painting was The Pale Complexion of True Love (1899). She soon began exhibiting her oil paintings at the Royal Academy, and her watercolours at the Dowdeswell Gallery, where she had several solo exhibitions.

Her works are always styled in the manner of the Pre-Raphaelites such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti or William Holman Hunt, using vibrant jewel like colors and representative 19th century subject matter.

 Frontispiece

 Sir Lancelot went ambassador, at first,
To fetch her, and she took him for the King.

In 1909, Ernest Brown, of the Leicester Galleries, commissioned a series of 28 watercolour illustrations to Tennyson's Idylls of the King, which she painted over two years. They were exhibited in the gallery in 1911, and 24 of them were published the next year in a deluxe edition of the first four Idylls

ENID 

To make her beauty vary day by day,
In crimsons and in purples and in gems.

 Enid

 Yniol's rusted arms
Were on his princely person, but thro' these
Princelike his bearing shone.

 They rode so slowly and they look'd so pale.

 And many past, but none regarded her.

VIVIEN

 At which the King
Had gazed upon her blankly and gone by.

 O master, do you love my tender rhyme ?

 Nor saw she save the King, who wrought the charm.

And in the hollow oak he lay as dead,
And lost to life and use and name and fame.

ELAINE

 Then to her tower she climb'd, and took the shield,
There kept it, and so lived in fantasy.

 But to be with you still, to see your face,
To serve you, and to follow you thro' the world.

 So those two brethren from the chariot took
And on the black decks laid her in her bed.

 Farewell, fair lily.

GUINEVERE

The Queen who sat betwixt her best
Enid, and lissome Vivien, of her court
The wiliest and the worst.

 It was their last hour,
A madness of farewells.

 Before the coming of the sinful Queen.

 They found a naked child upon the sands
Of dark Dundagil by the Cornish sea ;
And that was Arthur ; and they foster'd him
Till he by miracle was approven King.

 As in the golden days.

The sombre close of that voluptuous day
Which wrought the ruin of my lord the King.