Who Was Ford Madox Brown?
Ford Madox Brown (1821-1893) was a British painter, designer, and important figure in the broader Pre-Raphaelite circle. He was closely associated with the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais) although he was not himself a formal member of the Brotherhood. Brown was born in Calais, France, on April 16, 1821, and died in Primrose Hill, London, on October 6, 1893. He studied painting in Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, and briefly in Rome before settling in England in 1845. He took on the young Dante Gabriel Rossetti as a pupil in 1848, just before the founding of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Brown is best known for his major painting "The Last of England" (1855) and for his series of murals depicting Mancunian history at Manchester Town Hall (1879-1893). His daughter Lucy Madox Brown married William Michael Rossetti (Dante Gabriel's brother), giving the family direct connection to the Pre-Raphaelite circle.
Ford Madox Brown. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
This guide covers who Ford Madox Brown was, his early life and European training, his association with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, his most famous paintings (especially "The Last of England" and "Work"), his Manchester Town Hall murals, his role at Morris's firm, and his cultural legacy.
Who was Ford Madox Brown?
Ford Madox Brown was a British painter and designer born in Calais, France, in 1821, who became one of the most important British painters of the Victorian period and a major figure in the broader Pre-Raphaelite circle. He never actually joined the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which a younger crowd founded in 1848. He was close to it from the start, though, and he had a real hand in how it developed.
Some of that was simple age. In 1848, the year the Brotherhood was founded, Brown was 27. Hunt was 21. Rossetti was 20 and Millais only 19. Brown had trained on the Continent as well, in Belgium and then in Rome, and he already had a career behind him, so to the younger men he was something close to an elder statesman. The actual link came through Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who began studying painting with Brown as a pupil in 1848, shortly before the Brotherhood was formed.
What he painted was close observation with a moral or a piece of history attached. "The Last of England" (1855) shows British emigrants leaving England. "Work" (1852-1865) fills a busy London street with people doing different kinds of labor. His last big undertaking was the set of twelve murals of Mancunian history at Manchester Town Hall (1879-1893). Influence ran both ways between him and the Brotherhood, yet the style stayed recognizably his own.
In 1861 he became a founding partner of Morris's firm. That gave him a place to design stained glass windows and furniture (other decorative pieces too), a second line of work running alongside the painting.
He died at home in Primrose Hill, London, on October 6, 1893, aged 72, and was buried at Saint Pancras and Islington Cemetery in Finchley, North London. By then the Browns were tied to the Pre-Raphaelites for good. His daughter Lucy Madox Brown had married William Michael Rossetti back in 1874.
What was Ford Madox Brown's early life?
Ford Madox Brown was born on April 16, 1821, in Calais, France, where his English father Ford Brown was working as a purser in the Royal Navy. The family was English, then, and in France only because of the father's naval career. Young Ford Madox Brown grew up between France and Belgium, and his first art training happened on the Continent rather than in Britain.
The talent showed early. In Bruges he studied under Albert Gregorius, and in Ghent under Pieter van Hanselaer. Antwerp came after that, where from 1837 to 1839 he worked under Gustaf Wappers. Those Antwerp years gave him solid academic technique, and they put him in touch with the Belgian Romantic tradition as well.
From 1840 to 1844 he lived in Paris, still developing as a painter, and in 1841 he married his first wife, Elisabeth Bromley. He was back in England briefly during those years, to exhibit work at the Royal Academy.
Rome, in 1845, is where things turned. There he met two of the German Nazarene painters, Friedrich Overbeck and Peter Cornelius. The Nazarenes wanted painting to go back to medieval and early Renaissance Italian art, which is more or less the program the English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood would later spell out. The meeting shows in Brown's work. His clear color first appears in the pictures of this period, and so does his neomedievalism.
1846 was a hard year. Elisabeth died, leaving him with their young daughter Lucy, and Brown came back from Rome by way of Paris and settled in London. He went on painting and exhibiting there through the late 1840s, and the reputation he built in those years is what led to his connection with the young Pre-Raphaelite circle.
Home from the late 1840s was a string of lodgings around London. In 1848 he took Dante Gabriel Rossetti on as a pupil, though not for long (Rossetti soon moved over to study with William Holman Hunt instead). Short as it was, that teaching arrangement is what tied Brown to the group, who went on to found the Brotherhood later that year.
What was Ford Madox Brown's relationship with the Pre-Raphaelites?
Ford Madox Brown was closely associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood from its founding in 1848 but was never himself a formal member of the Brotherhood. Why not is still argued over. He was older than the founders, and his style was already further along than theirs. It may also be that his independent reputation made joining pointless, for him and for them.
Rossetti was the real bridge. He studied with Brown briefly in 1848 and then moved on to William Holman Hunt, so the lessons didn't last long, but the friendship did, for the rest of Rossetti's life. Each rubbed off on the other. Rossetti's influence turns up in a lot of Brown's later paintings, and Brown helped shape Rossetti's style while it was still forming.
In the paintings of the late 1840s and 1850s the Pre-Raphaelite influence is plain. Brown's observation is minute. His color is bright, often laid over a white ground, and the subjects carry serious moral weight along with a lot of complicated symbolic detail. Many of his major pictures from those years, "The Last of England" and "Work" among them, follow Pre-Raphaelite principles closely, membership or no membership.
He showed in the same venues they did, and the major critics of the period reviewed him alongside them. When John Ruskin came out in support of the Pre-Raphaelites in 1851, some of that support reached Brown too, up to a point. Ruskin was never as close to him as he was to Hunt and Millais.
Within the wider circle, though, Brown stayed a respected senior figure for the rest of his life. He'd been Rossetti's teacher. He was close to the others and believed in the same things on canvas, and that made him part of the Pre-Raphaelite community in all but name. (We'd say that half-in, half-out position is exactly what makes him worth reading about.)
The friendships became a business in 1861, when Brown was one of the founding partners of Morris's firm. William Morris was in it, naturally, along with Philip Webb. Rossetti joined, as did Edward Burne-Jones. P.P. Marshall and Charles Faulkner made up the rest. Brown's part of the work ran to stained glass windows and furniture, among other decorative things.
What are Ford Madox Brown's most famous paintings?
Brown's most famous paintings include "The Last of England" (1855), "Work" (1852-1865), "Christ Washing Peter's Feet" (1851-1856), "An English Autumn Afternoon" (1852-1855), "Pretty Baa-Lambs" (1851-1859), "Manfred on the Jungfrau" (1840-1861), and the twelve murals depicting Mancunian history at Manchester Town Hall (1879-1893). His paintings hang at Tate Britain and the National Portrait Gallery. Manchester Art Gallery and the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery have more, and plenty of other museums hold some as well.
Start with "The Last of England" (1855), his most important picture. A British emigrant couple are on board a ship leaving England, with the white cliffs of Dover behind them. The idea came from a friend's departure. Thomas Woolner, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's sculptor and a friend of the Brown family, had emigrated to Australia in 1852. For the wife, Brown used Emma Hill as his model (they'd married in 1853, after his first wife's death). There's more than one version. The main one is at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, and smaller ones are elsewhere.
"Work" (1852-1865) is the other great one, and it took him thirteen years. It's a crowded London street scene on Heath Street, Hampstead, where the figures stand for different kinds of labor. Navvies dig a trench. There's an Irish flower-seller, and two intellectuals stand watching (Brown modeled them on Thomas Carlyle and F.D. Maurice), with others around them. Social commentary told through a detailed urban scene was what interested him here. It's at Manchester Art Gallery now.
Tate Britain has "Christ Washing Peter's Feet" (1851-1856), the biblical scene of Christ washing his disciples' feet. The Pre-Raphaelite influence is strong in it, both in the detailed observation and in how seriously the religious content is taken.
Then there's "Manfred on the Jungfrau" (1840-1861), from Byron's poem "Manfred," with the title character up on the Jungfrau mountain in Switzerland. He started it in 1840 and finished it in 1861. Over twenty years. You can more or less watch his style develop across that long stretch.
"An English Autumn Afternoon" (1852-1855) is a landscape, an autumn afternoon in Hampstead with a couple resting on a hilltop and London visible in the distance. It's one of the most beautiful pure landscapes he painted. You'll find it at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.
Birmingham also has "Pretty Baa-Lambs" (1851-1859), in which Emma Hill and their young daughter Catherine are out in a sunlit landscape with three lambs. Brown was experimenting here with painting outdoor scenes in direct sunlight. That's a problem the impressionists would take up later.
Around the big canvases there's a great deal of smaller work. He made smaller paintings and watercolors, and over his whole career he also turned out designs for stained glass and book illustrations. It's a substantial body of work for a painter whose major pictures so often took years to finish.
Seeing them in person mostly means a trip to Birmingham, which has three of the six described here. Manchester has "Work," and the Town Hall murals are in the same city. "Christ Washing Peter's Feet" means a stop at Tate Britain. With only one day to spare, we'd go to Manchester, where you can see the street scene and the murals on the same visit.
What are the Manchester murals?
The Manchester murals are a series of twelve large murals at Manchester Town Hall painted by Ford Madox Brown between 1879 and 1893, depicting episodes from the history of Manchester (Mancunian history). Nothing else he took on late in his career was as ambitious, and among Victorian mural commissions in Britain it's one of the most important.
Alfred Waterhouse designed Manchester Town Hall, a major new civic building in the Gothic Revival style, completed in 1877. A building like that needed decorating. Its public rooms had to be filled (the Great Hall above all, and the ceremonial spaces around it), and the commission for the main mural cycle in the Great Hall went to Brown.
The cycle runs from Roman times to the early modern period. It opens, sensibly enough, with "The Romans Building a Fort at Mancenion," and "The Baptism of Edwin" is there as well. Weaving gets "The Establishment of Flemish Weavers in Manchester." Wycliffe turns up in "The Trial of Wycliffe." You'll also find "Bradshaw's Defence of Manchester," while science turns up in "John Dalton Collecting Marsh-Fire Gas" and "Crabtree Watching the Transit of Venus."
Brown researched the history in detail and then painted it his own way. The compositions are strongly narrative. Figures and costume get careful attention, and there's elaborate symbolic detail layered over everything. It took him fourteen years, 1879 to 1893, and since 1893 was the year he died, the murals are essentially his final major work.
They're still in the Great Hall of Manchester Town Hall. People who know the period widely rank them among the most important Victorian mural cycles in Britain. As public art projects of their era go, few were as ambitious.
His other big mural commission was a small series at the Oxford Union. That's the building where the Pre-Raphaelite circle painted the famous Oxford Union murals in 1857-1859, which deteriorated quickly because the materials were wrong for the job. Manchester gave Brown something far more substantial, and it lasted.
What was Ford Madox Brown's family?
Ford Madox Brown was married twice and had three surviving children. Elisabeth Bromley came first. They married in 1841, and she died in 1846, probably of tuberculosis. Their daughter, Lucy Madox Brown (1843-1894), outlived her mother and was raised in the Brown household.
His second wife, Emma Hill, was a working-class woman he met around 1848. They lived together for several years and only married in 1853, by which time their daughter Catherine had been born (in 1850). Oliver Madox Brown came along next (1855-1874, known as "Nolly"), and then Arthur Gabriel Madox Brown, born in 1856, who died as an infant. Emma modeled for a lot of Brown's paintings. The best known is "The Last of England," where she's the emigrant wife.
Lucy grew up to be a painter herself. In 1874 she married William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel's brother, which brought the Browns directly into the Pre-Raphaelite circle. She and William Michael had five children, one of them the writer Olivia Rossetti.
Oliver was the prodigy, a painter and a writer, and he died of blood poisoning at nineteen. It was a terrible blow to Brown. He had been training the boy to follow him into painting.
Catherine married the music critic Francis Hueffer, and their son, Ford Madox Hueffer (1873-1939), became a major Edwardian and modernist British writer under the name Ford Madox Ford. He changed his surname from Hueffer to Ford in 1919. Partly it was in honor of his grandfather. The other reason was to distance himself from his German heritage during the First World War.
People do mix the two of them up. Ford Madox Brown (1821-1893) was Ford Madox Ford's grandfather, and he was the painter, while the grandson was a novelist and editor a couple of generations later. After the 1919 change they shared a surname, and an interest in art and literature as well, which has sometimes caused confusion in the broader literature.
What was Ford Madox Brown's religion?
Ford Madox Brown was nominally Christian (Anglican) but appears to have been more interested in moral and social themes than in strict religious devotion. He painted several biblical subjects, "Christ Washing Peter's Feet" and "The Body of Harold Brought Before William the Conqueror" among them. There was religious-themed stained glass for Morris's firm as well. In all of it he went for historical realism and moral content over conventional religious sentiment.
What he actually believed is less clearly documented than it is for some of his contemporaries. William Holman Hunt was an Evangelical Protestant Christian. James Collinson converted to Roman Catholicism, while Dante Gabriel Rossetti had a complicated Italian Anglican-Catholic heritage. Brown seems to have sat nearer agnostic and humanist, with deep moral commitments and much less explicit religious doctrine.
His politics are easier to read. In later life Brown moved toward radicalism and was sympathetic to socialist and reform movements, and "Work" shows a serious concern for the dignity of labor and for the social conditions of working people. That puts him in the same Pre-Raphaelite and Arts and Crafts political tradition that William Morris and others went on to develop more fully.
Holman Hunt makes a useful comparison. Both men joined detailed realism to serious moral content, but Brown left out most of the Evangelical doctrine. His biblical paintings are about the human and historical reality of the subject, not an idealized religious image.
The funeral was conventionally Anglican for the period, a standard Christian burial at Saint Pancras and Islington Cemetery in Finchley, North London. By Victorian standards his religious life seems to have been quiet. Undramatic, even.
What is Ford Madox Brown known for?
Ford Madox Brown is known for several major contributions to nineteenth-century British art: his major paintings (especially "The Last of England" and "Work"), his closeness to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood without formal membership, his role as Dante Gabriel Rossetti's brief teacher, his founding partnership in Morris's firm in 1861, and his ambitious mural cycle at Manchester Town Hall.
The paintings come first. Brown took detailed Pre-Raphaelite observation and gave it strong moral and social content, in historical and contemporary scenes alike, packed with elaborate symbolic detail. Many took years to complete. That pairing of careful looking and moral seriousness, worked out in ambitious compositions, is what makes him distinctive in Victorian British art.
In Pre-Raphaelite history he's a major figure, formal membership or not. He taught Rossetti in 1848. He shared the founders' artistic principles and kept up a creative partnership with the wider circle afterward, which is why he holds a central place in the story.
Then there's the design side. As a founding partner of Morris's firm in 1861 he contributed designs for stained glass windows and furniture, as well as other decorative items, until the firm was reorganized in 1875. That work carried his influence past painting and into the broader Arts and Crafts Movement.
Manchester is the last piece. The Town Hall murals (1879-1893) are one of the most important Victorian mural cycles in Britain, twelve scenes of the city's history that bring his painting to civic public art on a major scale. They're still in place at Manchester Town Hall, and visitors still admire them.
His way of working spread well beyond his own canvases. He brought detailed observation and moral commitment to a picture, and he backed them with social engagement and serious historical research. Victorian narrative painting felt that influence right through the second half of the nineteenth century. The family name also found its way into literature. His grandson Ford Madox Ford, the novelist, linked it to early twentieth-century literary modernism.
When did Ford Madox Brown die?
Ford Madox Brown died on October 6, 1893, in Primrose Hill, London, at age 72. He died at home, 1 Saint Edmund's Terrace in Primrose Hill. The immediate cause seems to have been apoplexy (a stroke), along with complications from gout. He'd been working almost to the end. The final Manchester Town Hall panels were done in early 1893, not long before he died.
He was buried in a family plot at Saint Pancras and Islington Cemetery in Finchley, North London. Emma Hill, who had died in 1890, lies there too. So does their son Oliver Madox Brown, who died of blood poisoning in 1874, along with other members of the family. A simple Celtic cross marks the grave, designed by Brown's grandson-in-law.
Manchester had filled his last years. The fourteen-year project (1879-1893) involved extensive research and design work, and then the painting of panel after panel. Brown traveled regularly between his London home and Manchester to work on it, and it used up much of his physical and creative energy toward the end.
Since then his reputation has risen and fallen with critical taste. In his lifetime and just after his death he was treated as a respected senior figure. Twentieth-century critics paid more attention to the Brotherhood's formal founders (Hunt, Millais, Rossetti) than to him. Late twentieth and twenty-first-century scholarship has brought him back, especially through major retrospective exhibitions at Manchester Art Gallery (2011-2012) and other venues.
The early record is a family affair. His grandson Ford Madox Ford wrote a biography of Ford Madox Brown, published in 1896, three years after Brown's death, and his daughter Lucy Madox Rossetti contributed memoirs and family papers. Later scholars have added their own studies since. Ford's book is still a primary source on Brown's life despite how close the author was to his subject, and we'd still start there (just keep the family connection in mind as you read).
Ford Madox Brown questions
Who was Ford Madox Brown?
Ford Madox Brown (1821-1893) was a British painter and designer born in Calais, France, who became one of the most important British painters of the Victorian period and a major figure in the broader Pre-Raphaelite circle. He trained abroad and settled in England in 1845. In 1848, just before the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded, Dante Gabriel Rossetti became his pupil, and in 1861 he was a founding partner of Morris's firm.
What was Ford Madox Brown famous for?
Brown is famous for his major paintings "The Last of England" (1855, depicting British emigrants leaving England) and "Work" (1852-1865, depicting a busy London street with figures representing different forms of labour), for his closeness to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (without being a formal member), for his founding partnership in Morris's firm, and for his ambitious mural cycle at Manchester Town Hall depicting Mancunian history (1879-1893). If you only see one of his paintings, we'd make it "Work."
What was Ford Madox Brown's religion?
Brown was nominally Anglican but appears to have been more interested in moral and social themes than in strict religious devotion. The record is thin, though, thinner than for some Pre-Raphaelite contemporaries. What's clearer is his politics. Later on he moved toward radicalism and was sympathetic to socialist and reform movements, and "Work" shows a serious concern for the dignity of labor.
Are Ford Madox Brown and Ford Madox Ford related?
Yes. Ford Madox Brown (1821-1893, the painter) was the grandfather of Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939, the novelist, born Ford Madox Hueffer). His mother was Brown's daughter Catherine Madox Brown and his father the music critic Francis Hueffer, and the 1919 switch from Hueffer to Ford was partly to honor his grandfather (and partly to distance himself from his German heritage during the First World War).
What was Ford Madox Ford known for?
Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939, formerly Hueffer) is known for his novels including "The Good Soldier" (1915) and the "Parade's End" tetralogy (1924-1928), for his editorship of the English Review (1908-1909) and the transatlantic review (1924-1925), and for his role in twentieth-century literary modernism. Don't confuse him with his grandfather Ford Madox Brown, the Victorian painter. With names that close, it's an easy mistake.
What is The Last of England?
"The Last of England" (1855) is Ford Madox Brown's most important painting, depicting a British emigrant couple aboard a ship leaving England, with the white cliffs of Dover visible in the background. Brown got the idea when his friend Thomas Woolner, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood sculptor, emigrated to Australia in 1852, and he used his wife Emma Hill as the model. Several versions exist. The main one belongs to the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.
What is Work?
"Work" (1852-1865) is one of Brown's most important paintings, depicting a busy London street scene on Heath Street, Hampstead, with figures representing different forms of labour: navvies digging a trench, an Irish flower-seller, two intellectuals observing (modeled on Thomas Carlyle and F.D. Maurice), and others. Thirteen years, start to finish. That's how long Brown spent on this piece of social commentary, which now hangs at Manchester Art Gallery.
What are the Manchester murals?
The Manchester murals are a series of twelve large murals at Manchester Town Hall painted by Ford Madox Brown between 1879 and 1893, depicting episodes from the history of Manchester from Roman times to the early modern period. They're still in the Great Hall of Manchester Town Hall, and they were his most ambitious late-career project (the last panels were finished in early 1893, months before his death).
