• In 1934, at the age of just 31, Reginald Brill became Head of Kingston School of Art and in the...
    Reginald Brill, Bell Ringers, Lavenham Church Pencil, pen & wash 112 x 88 cm Exhibited: Royal Academy of Art, Summer Exhibition 1963, no. 1032
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    In 1934, at the age of just 31, Reginald Brill became Head of Kingston School of Art and in the same year embarked upon an ambitious series of paintings that he originally titled ‘The Martyrdom of Man’. As his teaching and administrative duties increased, and the time he could devote to his own art decreased, he came to describe it as ‘The Plan’ but it remained central to his life’s work. Imbued with a humanity and empathy for the lives of others, Brill had an indefatigable interest in the everyday lives of working people, often captured of-guard. Just the titles of his works are revealing: ‘Have you heard this one?’ as three old men on a park bench exchange fruity stories; ‘Let me tell you’ where a smaller man jabs his finger for emphasis at his much larger companion; ‘Men staring down a manhole’ which needs no explanation, but which reveals Brill’s purely English sensibility.

    Brill liked to paint on a large scale – Chris Beetles comments on their unique combination of monumentality and homeliness - and his drawings are often of an unusually large size. ‘Bell Ringers, Lavenham Church’, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1963, is a technical tour de force, with Brill displaying his absolute mastery of pen and ink. In the 1920s, as a very young artist he was commissioned by Lansbury’s Labour Weekly to produce over 40 portraits of notable socialists, and starting off using bold hatching and cross-hatching to achieve a likeness he gradually experimented with stippling and other techniques. He continued to refine his technique throughout his life, and gradually the stippling became a more expressive but always carefully controlled spattering, softened by monochrome washes.

     

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  • ‘Bell ringers, Lavenham Church’ was purchased by our art advisory service, Fine Art Brokers Ltd (link) in 2008 on behalf...

    Reginald Brill   In the Kitchen, 1961  Oil  99 x 124 cm (sold in 2013)

    ‘Bell ringers, Lavenham Church’ was purchased by our art advisory service, Fine Art Brokers Ltd (link) in 2008 on behalf of a client who is now re-selling it. Over the years we have bought (and sold) a number of important works by Brill, often acquired from unusual sources. Thus a large drawing for the oil painting ‘Rest’ that is in Tate Britain was bought at auction in San Francisco; the R.A. exhibit of 1961 ‘In the Kitchen’ came from the kitchen of a small terraced house in Chichester; an enormous painting ‘Mid-day’ had been crammed into an apartment in a retirement home on the Suffolk coast with just a couple of inches to spare between floor and ceiling.

  • We have just bought one of Brill’s most important paintings, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1959, from a collection...
    Reginald Brill Mid-Day, 1957 Oil 244 x 160 cm (sold in 2015)

    We have just bought one of Brill’s most important paintings, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1959, from a collection in the San Fernando Valley in California – watch this space for more details.

     

    Brill’s painting ‘Rest, 1956’ was purchased by the Friends of the Tate Gallery in 1998,  and his 2m high painting ‘Unemployed, 1934-6’ was acquired in 2019 and has, we gather, just been hung in Tate Britain as part of the first rehanging of the entire gallery for more than a decade.