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Abstract
This article argues that Ford Madox Brown’s modern-life painting should be seen as a subset of his practice in history painting. Whether he chose subject-matter from the contemporary world or from the past, Brown sought to give it the weight and ethical seriousness traditionally associated with history painting. This ambition helps to make sense of Brown’s practice in religious painting, an area neglected in the previous secondary literature, but which this article argues was of crucial importance to Brown’s artistic project. His distinctive innovation was to replace the generalized timescale of traditional history painting with multiple temporalities: timed history, the timeless, and the modern perspective.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Katie Tyreman for research assistance, and Tim Barringer, Charles Martindale, and the editors of this special issue for their valuable comments on earlier drafts.
Notes
1 The painting was displayed for a week in September 1855 in rented premises in London, but a decision was taken not to submit it for the Royal Academy exhibition of 1856, so the Liverpool Academy showing was its first appearance at a conventional public exhibition. See Bennett, Ford Madox Brown, 1: 163–7 (cat. A61). This catalogue is now the indispensable source for basic data on Brown’s works.
2 James, The Painter’s Eye, 253–4 (from ‘London’, Harper’s Weekly, June 5, 1897).
3 D.G. Rossetti [published anonymously], ‘Mr. Madox Brown’s Pictures’, 2. A full transcript is available in the Rossetti Archive, http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/ldn.1856.rad.html. For Brown’s account of the circumstances see Surtees, Diary, 186–7 (entry for September 8, 1856).
4 Wright, ‘Ford Madox Brown’s The Body of Harold’, penultimate paragraph.
5 Indeed there has been an inexplicable tendency to play down Brown’s Socialism, which remained firm to the end of his life and led to concrete action. See Hueffer, Ford Madox Brown, 375–6, 401; Werner, Pre-Raphaelite Painting, 248–50.
6 Wright, ‘Ford Madox Brown’s The Body of Harold’, note 37.
7 This response was not necessarily the intention of the exhibition’s curator.
8 D.G. Rossetti, ‘Mr. Madox Brown’s Pictures’, 2.
9 W.M. Rossetti, ‘Art News’, 279.
10 Lushington, ‘Two Pictures’, 487.
11 Athenaeum no. 1802 (May 10, 1862): 633.
12 Brown, Exhibition of WORK, cat. 14.
13 On Work as a History Painting see Barringer, Men at Work, 35–44.
14 Brown, Exhibition of WORK, cat. 14.
15 For these questions of temporality I am particularly indebted to Martindale, ‘Ruins of Rome’; Kermode, The Classic; and Kennedy, Antiquity and the Meanings of Time.
16 Wright, ‘Ford Madox Brown’s The Body of Harold’, penultimate paragraph.
17 Rabin, Ford Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelite History-Picture, 34. On Brown as a historical painter, see also Barringer, ‘Ford Madox Brown (1821–1893)’; and Codell, ‘Ford Madox Brown, Carlyle, Macaulay, Bakhtin’, which concentrates on Brown’s mural paintings for Manchester Town Hall (1878–94) and usefully considers his response to new developments in nineteenth-century historiography.
18 Bennett, Ford Madox Brown, cat. A24.
19 Bennett, Ford Madox Brown, cat. A40. On Brown’s Chaucer as a History Painting see Barringer, ‘Historical and Modern?’.
20 For practicality’s sake, actually executed during three successive autumns, 1852–4, though the title at first exhibition was An English Autumn Afternoon, Hampstead – Scenery in 1853 (Bennett, Ford Madox Brown, cat. A60).
21 Bennett, Ford Madox Brown, cats A106–20; only the last of the twelve, Dalton Collecting Marsh Gas, lacks a year date.
22 Discourse III (1770), in Reynolds, Discourses on Art, 49.
23 Brown, ‘On the Mechanism’; Brown, ‘Historic Art’. Other relevant writings by the artist include ‘Modern v. Ancient Art’; ‘The Influence of Antiquity’; Particulars Relating to the Manchester Town Hall; and ‘Of Mural Painting’.
24 Brown, ‘Historic Art’, 39.
25 Barringer, Men at Work, 35–6.
26 Discourse IV (1771), in Reynolds, Discourses on Art, 58.
27 See however Barringer, Men at Work, 48–66; Giebelhausen, Painting the Bible, 2–5, 78–84.
28 According to his grandson and first biographer, Ford Madox Hueffer (the novelist who later changed his name to Ford Madox Ford), ‘In his early days he was a conventional member of the Church of England; in later years he was an absolute Agnostic, with a great dislike for anything of the nature of priestcraft’ (Hueffer, Ford Madox Brown, 401). Accordingly, the Unitarian minister Moncure Conway was engaged to perform a non-sectarian service for the funerals both of Brown himself (1893) and of his beloved son, Oliver Madox Brown (1874). It is possible that Brown decisively lost his faith at the time of his son’s death, and indeed he virtually ceased to paint religious subjects after that date – although that may be a coincidence, since many of his designs for scripture subjects derived either from the Dalziel Bible project of the 1860s or from stained glass commissions, which stopped after the reorganization of William Morris’s decorative firm in 1875.
29 Bennett, Ford Madox Brown, cat. A57. For an illustration see the Tate website, NO1394.
30 Brown, Exhibition of WORK, cat. 14.
31 Ruskin, Letter to The Times, in Works of John Ruskin 12: 322.
32 Brown, Exhibition of WORK, cat. 12.
33 See Giebelhausen, Painting the Bible, 159–87 and passim.
34 Warner, ‘Pre-Raphaelites’, 3–5.
35 For the complicated history see Bennett, Ford Madox Brown, 1: 84–90 (cats A44–A44.14). For an illustration see the Tate website, NO2674.
36 For possible sources see Giebelhausen, Painting the Bible, 78–80, and Bendiner, Art of Ford Madox Brown, 17.
37 Brown, Exhibition of WORK, cat. 3.
38 See the interesting discussion of Brown’s humour in Bendiner, Art of Ford Madox Brown, 23–44.
39 See Curtis, ‘Ford Madox Brown’s Work’.
40 The quotation, from David Hume’s History of England (1754–61), was appended to the cartoon version, no. 7 in the catalogue to the Westminster Hall exhibition of 1844, along with a quotation from Augustin Thierry’s History of the Conquest of England by the Normans (1825). The painted version (in oil with wax encaustic), exhibited as no. 8, is now in Manchester City Galleries. See Bennett, Ford Madox Brown, cats A30, A30.1.
41 Brown, Exhibition of WORK, cat. 28.
42 Wright, ‘Ford Madox Brown’s The Body of Harold’.
43 White, Metahistory, 7–11 and passim; the modes of emplotment derive from Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957).
44 Fried, Absorption and Theatricality; Fried’s subsequent work has extended the binary concept to the art of the nineteenth century and beyond.
45 Brown, Exhibition of WORK, cat. 1. Cf. Prettejohn, ‘The Pre-Raphaelite Model’, 28–34.
46 Hueffer, Ford Madox Brown, 421.
47 Brown, ‘On the Mechanism’, 71.
48 Brown, Exhibition of WORK, cat. 20 (the passage relates to the earlier watercolour version, St Ives AD1636, Bennett, Ford Madox Brown, cat. A62). On Brown’s engagement with Carlyle see Codell, ‘Ford Madox Brown, Carlyle, Macaulay, Bakhtin’; Trodd, ‘Culture and Energy’.
49 Cf. Werner, Pre-Raphaelite Painting, 261.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Elizabeth Prettejohn
Elizabeth Prettejohn has published widely on Victorian art, taste and aesthetics. Her principal publications include The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (2000); Beauty and Art 1750–2000 (2005); Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (2007); and The Modernity of Ancient Sculpture: Greek Sculpture and Modern Art from Winckelmann to Picasso (2012). She has also edited After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England (1999) and The Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites (2012).