Painter, water colorist, engraver, illustrator, and designer Frank Brangwyn was born in Bruges, Belgium, where his father had been commissioned to design a new church; he returned to Britain with his family in 1874.

He was largely self-taught, and never pursued a formal education in the arts. His natural talent as a painter led to the acceptance of one of his works at the Summer Exhibition of the Royal Academy when he was 17, and strengthened his determination to be an artist. His stylistic development was strongly influenced his interest in the Orientalist movement of the late 19th Century, which inspired his subsequent travels to Spain, Egypt, Morocco, and Turkey. His acquaintance with gallerist Siegfried Bing in Paris led Brangwyn to produce murals and to design tapestries, posters, carpets, and stained glass, many of the latter for Louis Comfort Tiffany. In subsequent years, he produced an astonishing number of murals in England and the North America, including a commission shared with Diego Rivera and Josep Maria Sert to decorate the concourse of the RCA building at Rockefeller Center in New York (1930 – 1934). But the breadth and depth of his artistic output defies the imagination: Brangwyn is credited with producing over 12,000 works, including some 1,600 oils and mixed media, some 500 etchings, 400 woodcuts and wood engravings and 300 lithographs. He died, probably of exhaustion, at his Sussex home.