Sketch of two men in flat caps s/f
Fuente: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/archive
The Aragón plain is a land of heat and silence, broken by the rattle of cicadas and the occasional rush of a train along the Zaragoza–Huesca line. In August 1936, near the small town of Tardienta, a young Englishwoman fell under machine-gun fire. Her name was Felicia Browne—the first British volunteer to die in the Spanish Civil War, and the only British woman to fight as a combatant.
Born in Surrey, in 1904, Felicia grew up in a comfortable household but refused the expected path. At sixteen she entered the Slade School of Art, precociously gifted, restless, and impatient with convention. By 1928 she was in Berlin, studying sculpture and apprenticed to a stonemason. There she witnessed the rise of Nazism at close quarters, leaving behind her tools and unfinished work when she fled.
In Britain she threw herself into the work of the Artists’ International Association. She contributed to Left Review, designed medallions for the trade union movement, and attracted the attention of Special Branch. Her art was inseparable from her politics: a belief that creativity must serve justice.
Fuente: https://en.wikipedia.org/
In July 1936 she set out with her friend, Dr Edith Bone, driving through France to Barcelona for the People’s Olympiad, a workers’ answer to Hitler’s Berlin Games. But Franco’s attempted coup transformed the city into a battlefield. Determined to act, Felicia tried to enlist as a nurse and was refused. On 3 August, she joined the attempted of the PSUC and went to the Aragón front.
Their base at Tardienta controlled the railway and aqueduct that fed rebel forces. Days passed in skirmishes and sudden fire across the fields. Felicia drew her comrades in moments of rest, villagers hollow-eyed with hunger, the stark horizon of Aragón. On 22 August, during an attempt to sabotage the railway, her unit was ambushed. An Italian volunteer was struck down. Felicia ran to him, bent to lift him, and was shot beside him. She was thirty-two.
Her drawings were sent home and exhibited in London that autumn. What survives is not a monument of stone but fragile lines on paper, an artist’s vision of dignity amid destruction. Felicia Browne’s life was brief, but her courage endures: proof that art and resistance can spring from the same unyielding impulse.
