Art Of Ford Madox Brown

This is the first comprehensive history devoted to the art of Ford Madox Brown (1821-93), in which his paintings establish him as a major figure in the most important new art movement of Victorian England, Pre-Raphaelitism. The book presents a new explanation of the development and basic aims of Pre-Raphaelite art as a whole and offers a revealing discussion of the power and importance of the humor and negative spirit that run throughout Brown's work. It also ties Brown's realist approach to British decorative taste at midcentury and redefines his place in the Aesthetic Movement, a cultural trend that dominated the latter half of the nineteenth century. In addition, the artist's socialist leanings and nationalistic tendencies, expressed in depictions of workers, children, women, and religious scenes, are set out more fully than in any previous literature on the artist.

Ford Madox Brown's fascinating realist painting Work takes as its heroes a group of labourers laying water pipes in The Mount, Hampstead. They are surrounded by a variety of picturesque characters representing the different classes and occupations of Victorian society, including two intellectuals - Thomas Carlyle and the Rev F. D. Maurice, whose ideas are crucial to the painting's meaning. This fully illustrated book tells the story behind Brown's masterpiece - its sources in popular art, its composition and its 'message', as well as its critical reception at the time and its impact on art in the twentieth century. Walker also examines the history of Hampstead in the 1850s, the wider issues of conflict and ideas in Victorian Britain and the social history of London with its cast of navvies, urchins and street vendors, philosophers, reformers and idlers

Published on the occasion of an exhibition held Sept. 24, 2011-Jan. 29, 2012 at Manchester Art Gallery and Feb. 25-June 3, 2012 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent.

Ford Madox Brown (1821-1893) is known predominantly for his close association, from 1848, with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and for his masterpiece, "The last of England" (1852-5), with its poignant imagery of a young emigrant couple taking their last sight of home-portraits of the artist himself and his wife. This fully illustrated catalogue provides the first complete coverage of all of Madox Brown's work. All aspects of his documented work, extant or lost, are presented in this magnificent catalogue, which includes a section on Madox Brown's frame designs (by Lynn Roberts). The artist's diary and his largely unpublished correspondence with associates and patrons provide a fascinating insight into his ideas and plan of work. A tour de force of scholarship, this book will be of immense value to scholars of nineteenth-century British art.

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