"Primrose Day" by Frank Bramley (1857-1915)

Primrose Day

Frank Bramley, RA (1857-1915)

1885

Oil paint on canvasW

Size: support: 502 × 351 mm; frame: 765 × 615 × 110 mm

Collection: Tate, ref. TO3962

Presented by Arthur Grogan, 1985

The painting commemorates Disraeli's death on 19 April 1881, by showing a young woman lost in reverie. With a framed portrait of Disraeli looking down on her, she has filled a vase of primroses, and still has others that she had gathered. Disraeli was known to love these flowers, and, with this in mind, the Primrose League had been started in 1883 to promote Conservative principles. [Mouse over the text for links. Commentary continues below.]

Image kindly released under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported) licence. Commentary by Jacqueline Banerjee.

The celebration of Primrose Day in 1885 was "extraordinarily lavish" because of widespread disillusionment with the Liberals (see Rezelman 71), and contemporary gallery-goers would have seen this as a political statement, as well as a study in harmonising colours. A number of artists took up this subject, but it is unlikely that Bramley, as a Newlyn artist who strove to present the lives of villagers, was simply following a popular trend. There is a genuine sense of loss here. Although this is not one of Bramley's popular works (it is not on display at the moment), it is an interesting painting that opens a window into the prevailing "Beaconsfield mania" of its time (Rezelman 62).

Bibliography

Rezelman, Betsy Cogger. "Frank Bramley's Primrose Day: A Disraeli Tribute and Artistic Gamble." Victorian Review 17/1 (1991): 51-77. Available on Jstor.

Tate Gallery. Gallery label, August 2004.

Created 10 March 2021