Sir Frank William Brangwyn RA RWS RBA (12 May 1867 – 11 June 1956) was a Welsh artist, painter, watercolourist, printmaker, illustrator and designer.

[3] In 1874 the family moved back to the United Kingdom where William Curtis Brangwyn established a successful design practice.

Frank Brangwyn attended Westminster City School but often played truant to spend time in his father's workshop or drawing in the South Kensington Museum.

[3] At the age of seventeen, one of Brangwyn's paintings was accepted and then sold to a shipowner, at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, which strengthened him in his conviction to become an artist.

Whereas Funeral at Sea, which won a medal at the Paris Salon in 1891 was mostly composed in grey, The Golden Horn, Constantinople was much brighter and full of colour.

Although Brangwyn held his first one-man show in London in 1891, he spent most of that year and 1890 at sea, visiting Spain several times as well as returning to Istanbul and travelling to South Africa and Zanzibar.

[3] In 1892 he visited northern Spain with the Scottish artist Arthur Melville, travelling from Saragossa along the Canal Imperial de Aragon on the barge, the Santa Maria.

[4] Soon Brangwyn was attracted by the light and the bright colours of these southern countries at a time when Orientalism was becoming a favoured theme for many painters.

[8] Brangwyn had an affair with Ellen Kate Chesterfield, which produced a son, James Barron Chesterfield-Brangwyn, born 1885 in Mevagissey, Cornwall.

Brangwyn was commissioned by his friend the artist Robert Hawthorn Kitson to design the dining room of Casa Cuseni, his house in Taormina, Sicily, built from 1902 to 1905.

[11] Other commissions included murals for the Great Hall of the Worshipful Company of Skinners in London (1901–1912), for the Royal Exchange, London (1906), the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, 1915 (now in the Herbst Theatre, Veteran's Building Auditorium, San Francisco), a Lunette for Cuyahoga County Courthouse, Cleveland, Ohio (1911–1915), the Manitoba Legislative Building, Winnipeg (1918–1921), the Chapel, Christ's Hospital School, Horsham (1912–1923), and the Missouri State Capitol, Jefferson City (1915–1925).

[12][13] Along with Diego Rivera and Josep Maria Sert, he was chosen by John D. Rockefeller Jr. to decorate the concourse of the RCA Building in New York City (1930–34) with murals.

[18] His grim poster of a Tommy bayoneting an enemy soldier (Put Strength in the Final Blow: Buy War Bonds) caused deep offence in both Britain and Germany.

[18] During the war Brangwyn created a number of propaganda images highlighting atrocities committed against Belgium and the suffering endured by the country.

[23] In 1944, he recovered and secured designs by Frederic Shields for the Chapel of the Ascension built by Herbert Horne, which was destroyed in 1940 during the London Blitz.

[30] The art writer Marius Gombrich links the decline of interest in Brangwyn's works to the decline of the British Empire, pointing out that Brangwyn's bold, vigorous, outward-looking art was suited to the expansive spirit of late-Victorian British society—but inconsistent with the inward-looking, less confident, and intellectually effete ethos prevalent in the post World War I period.