Ford Madox Brown: pre-Raphaelite pioneer and working-class hero | Art and design | The Guardian
Hear the words "Ford Madox Brown" and "Manchester" in the same sentence, and you think automatically of the Town Hall murals, that 12-part picture book of the city's history which Brown was commissioned to paint on the interior walls of Alfred Waterhouse's neo-gothic civic palacein 1878. Here, in bold outlines and strong colours, looped around the magnificent Great Hall, you can trace the moment the Danes were expelled from the city in 920, or the day in 1761 the Duke of Bridgewater opened his eponymous canal, allowing coal from his mines to be delivered straight to the heart of "Cottonopolis".
Look closely at the murals, though, and you'll see they have none of the grand swagger usually associated with Victorian public art. The Danes are keystone cops, tripping over each other as they quit the city, while the duke – a confirmed teetotaller – looks suspiciously excited and flushed. Surprisingly perhaps, these sly subversions are not the work of a young man. Brown was 72 when the paintings were finally finished in 1893 and they represent the summation of a five-decade career. Moreover, as this Autumn's Ford Madox Brown: Pre-Raphaelite Pioneer at Manchester Art Gallery reveals, such inspired mischievousness had been wound into Brown's work from the beginning. Starting with his first apprentice pieces in the late 1830s, he had been testing and tweaking the rules of established art practice in a way that frequently piqued his critics and still gives his admirers much to ponder today.
Brown's work has none of the hyper-loveliness of the pre-Raphaeliteswith whom his name is so often bracketed, even though he was never a formal member of the Brotherhood, that group of seven excitable young men who made a pact in 1848 to revolutionise English art by returning it to the purity of the 14th century. While Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt rendered their historical, literary and mythological subjects with a metaphorical high varnish, Brown welcomed in the mess of every day. In his paintings hard noon light casts unflattering shadows on his sitters, who grimace and squint in protest. Colours clash, as they are apt to do in real life, while the children Brown loved to paint have the look of pudgy potatoes. Even his women are less than perfect. While technically Emma Hill, Brown's second wife and favourite model, was a working-class "stunner" chased from his studio into his bed, she departs from the bruised sensuality of Lizzie Siddal orJane Morris in important ways. Instead of the rivers of hair and beestung lips there is a neat coif and an oddly shortened upper lip, which makes Mrs Brown look less like a medieval temptress and more like an amiable rodent.
All this strangeness comes together in Brown's painting of 1851-9, Pretty Baa-Lambs. Ostensibly a picture of a woman in 18th-century dress holding a baby and petting some sheep, it is impossible to know quite what to make of it. The antique costume might suggest rococo pastoralism, something after Gainsborough perhaps. But Brown has added a sharp dose of the here and now. The painting was made entirely en plein air, all the better to capture the effects of a fierce midsummer sun. The woman's face is bright red, an English rose flaring unflatteringly in the heat, while the baby's sheeny arms look like over-stuffed sausages. Contemporaries were scarcely impressed – "a facetious experiment upon public intelligence" suggested one – and even now it is hard to decide whether it is, or is not, absolutely horrid.
The main reason that Brown never joined the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was that he was already embarked on a similar project. He was born in 1821, which made him a good seven years older than Rossetti, Hunt and Millais (Rossetti, indeed, had first made contact by asking whether Brown might take him on as a pupil). Brown's training had been different too. While the others had mostly come through the Royal Academy Schools, Calais-born Brown had attended the academies of Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp, where he had absorbed the realism and fine detail of the early Flemish and Dutch painters. His admiration for the sincerity and truthfulness of art made before the high Renaissance was further boosted by a trip to Italy in 1845, where he was able to see the great altarpieces and fresco cycles of Giotto and Fra Angelico at first hand.
The subjects that Brown chose to paint were particular to him too. While the other pre-Raphaelites often lost themselves in a dreamscape of the distant or mythologised past, Brown's work was just as likely to crackle with the dilemmas of the present. In 1852 he started on his masterpiece,Work, a sprawling multi-figured composition which went someway to meeting Baudelaire's urgent demand that artists should take as their subject "the heroism of modern life". The scene is Heath Street in Hampstead, where navvies are digging up the road. Around and beyond them cluster sightseers and passers-by drawn from every level of society: a do-gooding lady with pamphlets, a man selling chickweed, some itinerant farm labourers, a scraggy little girl in charge of her younger siblings and, standing to the side, two middle-class men whom a contemporary viewer would easily spot as Thomas Carlyle and the Christian Socialist reformer, the Rev FD Maurice. The detail is inexhaustible and the purpose multiple. On one level the painting serves as a reminder that this newly urbanised society depends on a variety of labour that would have been unthinkable even 50 years earlier. But in its careful delineation of individual characters, the painting also suggests that every man and woman, of whatever social class, needs work as a kind of soul medicine. Or, to quote Carlyle, one of the "brainworkers" in the picture, "In Idleness alone is there perpetual despair."
It wasn't just the subject of Work that was new. The painting dispenses with visual hierarchies, so that on first viewing it is not clear which are the most important figures. Incidents spread over the picture without ever quite coming into focus, which makes the eye skitter frantically over the picture plane. Each subsequent viewing reveals new clusters of characters, all absorbed in their own mini-dramas. Brown, wedded to the pleasures of narrative, wrote detailed backstories for each of his people: the pot boy, he explained, may well be wishing that leafleting do-gooder would listen to his opinion for a change, while the girl turned thuggish childminder is coping with an alcoholic father who will soon be up before the bench. In contrast to one of those big crowd scenes painted byWilliam Powell Frith, the figures here push beyond their symbolic envelopes to become fully imagined men and women.
The painting was remarkable too in the degree to which it was painted out of doors: Brown rigged up a trolley and wheeled the canvas every day into position. In this commitment to catching the exact play of summer light on a leafy street he anticipated the Impressionists by several decades. Meanwhile, the figures, modelled by friends, acquaintances and amenable members of the working class, were done in the studio where Brown agonised for weeks over such details as the potboy's fancy waistcoat. Even his pre-Raphaelite associates, known for taking pains, worried that Brown's "excessive elaboration" meant thatWork would never be done.
Painting en plein air, though, was not always possible. Brown's other great masterpiece, The Last of England, was conjured from his imagination or, as he put it, painted "as it would appear". The work concerns a young, shabby, middle-class couple setting out for a new life in Australia. The name of the boat – Eldorado – suggests that they are part of the southern hemisphere's short-lived gold rush of the 1850s. Their faces are blank and baffled by the scale of the step they are taking while their bodies radiate the pinched exhaustion of people who have no choice. The woman is based on Emma. The man is Brown himself, known in his youth as handsome, but here modelling the kind of sullen impotence you might see on a clever young man who has come down in the world. As ever, Brown lightens the whole effect with sly touches of humour: where you might expect to see lifebelts he has hung a row of scurvy-beating cabbages.
Underpinning these two great paintings lay Brown's abiding interest in the underdog. Unlike his friend William Morris, he was never a systematic socialist, opting instead to make a series of pragmatic and personal interventions in the lives of the poor. He taught art at the Working's Mens' College and, later, set up the Labour Bureau in Manchester. In the same way, his art is one of engaged observation rather than noisy propaganda. Perhaps this was because, unlike the independently wealthy Morris, Brown understood poverty to be a complex, nuanced business. While never actually starving, he spent at least two decades of his working life harried by a lack of cash. The Last of England sold for less than it should, and Brown's hyper-sensitivity also meant that he tended to crash up against the institutions and people who would have done him most good. On one occasion, when John Ruskin, that great champion of the pre-Raphaelites, asked him why his recent An English Autumn Afternoon featured such an "ugly" view of Hampstead's rooftops, Brown flashed back sulkily "because it lay out of a back window".
A difficult family life – his first wife died young, his second wife was an alcoholic, and he also lost his two beloved sons – hardly helped Brown to live in the strong sunshine that he so often chose to paint. That did not mean, though, that he plunged into sourness. Some of his most successful drawings and paintings are of children, whom he managed to capture without resorting to Millais's later kitsch (it is impossible to think of Brown making a painting like Bubbles). In his sketches of his own babies he shows them not as cherubs, but as snuffling young animals. Later, while living in Manchester and working on the Town Hall murals, he painted Madeline Scott, daughter of CP Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian, sitting proudly astride her tricycle – the first time that such a contraption had ever been wheeled into a portrait painting.
As this suggests, Brown found Britain's premier industrial city to be a conducive place to spend the last decade or his working life. Although he had no prior relationship with Manchester, its brisk, nonconformist atmosphere suited him particularly well. While reviewing the city's history to find subjects for his murals, he found an abundance of moments that chimed with his own subtle understanding of the human condition. The Trial of Wycliffe, AD 1377, for instance, suggests a profound sympathy with proto-Protestant Wycliffe's project of democratising ancient mysteries. Meanwhile in John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle, AD 1753, Brown shows us Kay fleeing from furious machine breakers, a wry reminder that what one man deems to be "progress" can also mean a downward tumble for countless others.
