The Communist Woman, Soldier, and Artist That You’ve Never Heard Of : Felicia Browne

Felicia Browne, a 32 year old Communist and voluntary female soldier, was the first British volunteer to die in the gory Spanish Civil War, which took the lives of nearly one million people. The two fighting sides of the war were the fascist Nationalists (who received aid from Mussolini’s Italy and Nazi Germany) and the Republicans, whom the Nationalists ultimately overpowered. The Nationalists killed Browne; she and her comrades were outfitting a fascist munitions train with dynamite to destroy it when the enemy spotted them. She and her companions fled, but the fascists shot her close friend. Browne stopped running, turned around, and attempted to save her friend. The fascists shot her and her companions could not recover her body.

However, her sketchbooks were recovered; Browne was an avid artist and had sketched many portraits of her fellow soldiers. Her comrades brought her sketchbooks back to England after the war, where they received critical acclaim after her death for the foreboding sense of doom that was present in her portraits of her fellow soldiers. Browne’s work left a strong impression on its viewers, just as Browne had stood out as a decisive woman to those who had known her. When the Spanish Civil War began (Browne was on vacation in Spain at the time), she enlisted to fight with the Karl Marx militia, stating that “I am a member of the London communists and can fight as well as any man”. She was the only known British woman who fought in the war as well as an outspoken, extreme leftist; she even traveled to the Soviet Union to observe a real Communist regime before declaring herself as a Communist.

Like the work of her famed contemporaries, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and Joan Miró, Browne captured the gruesome destruction of the Spanish Civil War, but unlike those well-known men, her name has been absent from art history classrooms and studies of the war. As a female, voluntary soldier and Communist who met a tragic end, it is remarkable that Browne’s artwork and life story have not received widespread attention; her story is unique and a noteworthy point in British art history.

Sources:

Tate. “Felicia Browne: Unofficial War Artist — Look Closer.” Tate. Accessed April 1, 2021. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/felicia-browne-22430/felicia-browne-unofficial-warartist.

Klugt, Melissa van der. “‘Red’ Artist for Whom the Bell Tolled in 1936: Sketches by Felicia Browne, the First Briton to Die in the Spanish Civil War, Are on Show, Writes Melissa van Der Klugt.” The Times. August 20, 2016, sec. News.