Edward Reginald Frampton

Edward Reginald Frampton was the son of Edward Frampton (1845 to 1928), a stained-glass designer with a London studio, and he trained first in that studio, spending roughly seven years learning the craft of stained glass before turning to painting. He was educated at Brighton Grammar School and then at the Westminster School of Art, where he was a contemporary of Aubrey Beardsley. He went on to study further in France and Italy, though no institution has recorded specific enrollment years or a formal degree for any stage of his education.

Standard reference sources disagree on his birth year, with some, including Tate and the English Wikipedia entry, giving 1870, and others, including Art UK, Christie's, and the Art Renewal Center, giving 1872. No source consulted supplies an exact birth date. What is not disputed is his career: he exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy from 1895 to 1923, showed at the New Gallery and the Royal Society of British Artists (member from 1894), and became a member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters in 1904, the Tempera Society in 1907, and the Art Workers' Guild in 1912. His painting St. Brendan was shown at the closing exhibition of the New Gallery and received a mention honorable at the Paris Salon. He held a one-man exhibition at Baillie's Gallery, London, in 1914, and continued to work in stained glass alongside painting.

Frampton died suddenly in Paris in November 1923, reportedly while traveling to Austria, and is recorded as buried in the cemetery of Saint-Germain. Most institutional sources, including Tate and multiple Wikipedia editions, give the date as 4 November 1923, though at least one market reference gives 5 November, and Christie's confirms only the month and city. Memorial exhibitions followed in 1924 at The Fine Art Society in London and in Glasgow.

Frampton attracted sustained, if limited, critical attention in his own lifetime. Writing in The International Studio in 1919, the critic Aymer Vallance praised St. Brendan for its showing at the closing exhibition of the New Gallery and its mention honorable at the Paris Salon. At his memorial exhibition at The Fine Art Society in March 1924, the critic Rudolf Dircks wrote a catalogue introduction praising Frampton's landscapes, a text later cited by dealers cataloguing his work. Modern commentary, including a 2023 centenary essay published by the Eclectic Light Company, situates Frampton as a late Pre-Raphaelite who fused the flattened, processional compositions of Puvis de Chavannes with the decorative language of Burne-Jones, particularly in his church murals.

The best-documented auction result for Frampton is The Annunciation, a watercolor that sold in 2006 for EUR 59,304, cited by the French valuation site Mr Expert as his record sale; the auction house and city for that sale are not confirmed in the sources available. Other results are far more modest, including a stained-glass panel, St. Margaret Queen of Scotland, which sold at Forum Auctions, London, for a hammer price of GBP 220, illustrating a wide gap between his strongest paintings and routine studio or decorative material. His work continues to reach the market mainly through auction houses and individual dealers rather than a confirmed ongoing gallery or estate representation.

Frampton is a minor figure with real institutional footing but a thin and inconsistent market record. There is no catalogue raisonne, and even basic biographical facts, his birth year and the exact date of his death, are recorded differently across major reference sources, so provenance and cross-checking against exhibition catalogues matter more than for artists with settled documentation. His one clearly documented high sale, EUR 59,304 for The Annunciation in 2006, cannot be tied to a confirmed auction house or city, and other recorded prices for decorative or stained-glass material are far lower, so any single result should be treated with caution rather than read as a market trend. Current buying and selling activity runs mainly through auction houses and individual dealers rather than a confirmed representing gallery, consistent with his standing as a well-documented but secondary-market artist.