Weekend Onesie: William Bruce Ellis Ranken

Weekend Onesie:

William Bruce Ellis Ranken

William Bruce Ellis Ranken (April 11, 1881, Edinburgh -  March 31, 1941, London), British artist and Edwardian aesthete. The son of a wealthy lawyer, he was educated at Eton where he studied watercolor painting, and then attended The Slade School of Art in London. With a prodigious output, working in watercolors, oils, and pastels, he received numerous portrait commissions from wealthy Americans, the British royal family and the aristocracy, as well as the interiors of their homes. While in the United States, Sargent introduced him to Isabella Stewart Gardner, and he received commissions to paint portraits of the wealthy, including the Whitneys, Vanderbilts and Havermeyers. He died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of fifty-nine and was buried near his beloved Warbrook House in Hampshire, the home he had owned for fifteen years but had had to sell during the Depression.

William Bruce Ellis Ranken

A fellow student was the actor Ernest Thesiger, who became a lifelong friend; he was painted by Ranken in 1918, and married Ranken's sister Janette Ranken in 1917. Following his unexpected death from a cerebral hemorrhage, his sister Janette gifted over 200 works to be distributed amongst UK public galleries and museums.

William Bruce Ellis Ranken

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Pictures At An Exhibition - Emerson, Lake & Palmer

(Mussorgsky)

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Pictures At An Exhibition - The Piano Guys

(Mussorgsky)