Ford Madox Brown

Ford Madox Brown was never formally a Pre-Raphaelite and painted the two pictures that best explain what they were for. He trained in Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp, which is why his handling is continental and his colour harder than the English norm, and he had already worked out most of the Brotherhood's ideas before it existed; Rossetti asked to be his pupil in 1848 and he taught him without ever joining. The Last of England, painted from himself and his wife in an open boat, records emigration as an ordinary domestic disaster and was made partly because his friend Woolner had left for Australia. Work, which took him thirteen years, puts navvies digging a road in the centre of a Hampstead street and arranges every English class around them, with Carlyle and F. D. Maurice watching from the side; it is the most fully argued picture of Victorian social painting and he wrote a long catalogue explaining it. He was a founder of Morris's firm and designed furniture and glass for it. His last commission was twelve murals for Manchester Town Hall, which occupied his final fifteen years. Ford Madox Ford was his grandson. Chaucer at the Court of Edward III and The Last of England are both in public collections in Australia and Birmingham. He was refused Royal Academy membership throughout his life and eventually held his own one-man exhibition in 1865 with a catalogue he wrote himself, which was almost unheard of. He designed stained glass for Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company from its founding in 1861 and resigned bitterly when Morris reorganised it. His daughter Lucy married William Michael Rossetti. The Manchester murals were finished in 1893, the year he died.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history