Frank Bramley, R.A. (1857-1915)

When Frank Bramley left Newlyn in 1895 the move was both literal and symbolic. Having been the first publicly feted Newlyn School painter with the purchase of A Hopeless Dawn (1888, Tate) for the national collection, he now realized that the days of stern naturalistic representations of fisherfolk had passed and he must strike out for something new. The path was indicated with Sleep (unlocated) shown at the Royal Academy in 1894, a painting of a child asleep on a garden bench, ‘drowsed by the fume of poppies’. This motif was revisited in a number of pictures thereafter, in which figures, sometimes posed by family or friends, are glimpsed through a halo of roses. This was the case with Delicious Solitude (1910, Royal Academy) in which the young woman seen in the present work sits reading, surrounded by spring blooms. At the same time Bramley painted an unidentified child, as a garden sprite, in Among the Roses (1911, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool). The present canvas takes the model from the first of these and combines her with the sense of fragrant envelopment found in the latter.
KMc.