FORD MADOX BROWN,
FORD MADOX BROWN was born in 1821 and died in 1893. He is usually classed with the Preraphaelite brethren, though, as a matter of fact, he was never a member of that fraternity. Nevertheless he was closely connected with the birth, life, and absorption into English art of their ideas. Madox Brown's association with the brethren began in 1846 when Rossetti, who had seen some of his work, wrote and asked to become his pupil. Madox Brown himself had got his art education at Bruges, Brussels, and Paris. He was con- sequently much more fully trained than most of the English painters of that time. For although his masters were stilted and academic, they were able to teach their pupils to draw well and to give them command of their materials. It was to this early training that Madox Brown owed the technical • Ford Mados Brown a Record of Ida Life and Work. By Ford M. Hueffer. London ; Longman!. Green. and Co.
mastery in which he was superior to most of the young painters of his time. It seems that when Brown was in Paris in 1841 at the age of twenty, he began to work out the then new idea of painting out-of-door light realistically in subject pictures. This was a complete protest against the ways of the time, and we may here quote the artist's own account of the prevailing fashion in painting against which he set himself :—
"Those were the days when my respected master, the late Baron Wappers, having been commissioned by his Government to paint the Belgian Revolution,' had, for speed's sake, two of his pupils, whose duty it was to smear in with their hands, early in the morning, as much asphaltum as he could afterwards cover in with revolutionary heroes during the remainder of the long summer day."
Bitumen, again, he says- " All artists liked in these days—even Turner, I believe—but no one who was not an artist liked it. These were the days when Wilkie's best works were coated with asphaltum, which has since made fissures all over them; when Hilton's 'Sabrina' was so flooded with it that it now has to be hung alternately right side and wrong side upwards to prevent the figures from entirely running either to the top or the bottom of the picture."
From this gloom of bitumen which enveloped the art of the early part of this century Madox Brown tried to escape into the light of day. It is a curious fact that about the time when this youth was beginning in Paris to think out the problem of out-of-door lighting of figures, there was then arising among the French painters the movement towards the open air, which, however, did not reach a definite stage till Millet settled at Barbizon in 1849. There is no evidence to show that the ideas of the young Englishman were known and discussed by the French artists. Possibly the result was arrived at by independent means. Possibly that passage in Lionardo's treatise on painting in which he describes an out- of-door studio may have suggested to each the germ of the new departure.
Madox Brown was essentially a realist of intense con- viction, but it was only by degrees that he freed his style from the academic encumbrances of his early training. The first picture in which his matured ideas were represented is "The Last Look at England," painted in 1855. In this work, which is circular, a young man and his wife, whose lovely face is sheltered under an umbrella, are sitting at the stern of an emigrant-ship ; behind them is seen the deck with other emigrants on it. The composition is highly characteristic of its painter ; it is crowded with form and detail. The smallest object is made out with the same minute- ness as the most important ones. Distance is only expressed by reduction of scale, not by any dimness of outline. This brings us to the consideration of the question of how far Madox Brown succeeded as a realist. By realism we mean the putting on canvas the appearance of the objects painted as they seem in Nature. One of the greatest problems a painter has to solve is the problem of focus. If we concen- trate our gaze on a near object, and while doing so consider how much we can make out of the definite forms of things in the distance behind that object, what do we find ? That the distant forms have lost their edges, and have resolved them- selves into masses of tone and colour, leaving the near form sharply cut out. But if instead we look hard at the distance, we shall find the near object blurred. A third plan is to dilate our eyes, and then instead of concentrating the vision on one object far or near, take a general survey. By this plan a balance of definition is struck between far and near objects, and a harmony of focus arrived at. Things near have lost sharpness and things at a distance have become more sharp. The picture seen by the eye is no longer a single near object with an indefinite background, but a balanced comprehension of the whole. Neither of these methods of actual vision were employed by Madox Brown ; he used a third and arbitrary plan. This plan was to define every object at every distance, as if the eye had been focussed anew for every separate part of the picture. The well-known picture of " Work " is an extreme example of this. The method was no doubt the result of the artist's passion for minute realisation of the things he painted,—a passion illustrated by the account of his having a pig brought into the Town Hall at Manchester, so that he might work direct from Nature on the frescoes with which he was decorating the walls. It is recorded that the squeals of this reluctant sitter disturbed an organ recital which was taking place in
the ball. The great degree of minute realism attained by Madox Brown makes the unnatural -focus we have been describing strongly apparent. There is something jarring in the mixture of an arbitrary focus with a strenuous attempt to put the world as it is on canvas.
But if we pass by this radical inconsistency, and consider the powers of the artist, we at once admit that they are of a very high order. A strongly individual personality, never sontent with a conventional conception, is perhaps the first thing that a general survey of this painter's work suggests. This originality was no doubt a stumbling-block to his contemporaries, but it seems incredible that the Academy should have skied, and the critics made fun of, the picture which now bangs in a well-merited post of honour in the National Gallery; we refer to the "Jesus Washes Peter's Feet." The present biography is written by Mr. Radler, a grandson of Madox Brown. The book has been written with great care and clearness. If we have any fault to find it is that we shottici have liked a little less detail of daily life and rather more of Mr. Hueffer's own critical appreciations. Only in the last chapter has he allowed himself to speak fully, and we wish that he had done so more often. In his later years Madox Brown Was chiefly occupied with the great series of frescoes which he executed in the Town Hall at Manchester. They are all historical, and many deal directly with the history of the city. In this volume, which is profusely illustrated with autotype reproductions from pictures, a number of the Manchester series are given. The wall-painting of "Wickliffe on Trial" is one of the finest of its painter's compositions. There is a rhythm of line which is not always present in this artist's work. Nothing could be better, too, than the contrast of the saintly grandeur of Wickliffe with the dull fury of the Bishop of London and the worldly indifference of the Arch- bishop of Canterbury, the two judges. Mr. Hueffer is no doubt right, that of the masters of the past Holbein is the one that influenced Madox Brown to the largest extent; but he was never a copyist. We often feel that he attempted to put meanings into his pictures which really only words could con- vey, and he seems conscious of this himself. Frequently he wrote long and elaborate descriptions of his pictures, which implied that he was conscious that his ideas were partly literary, and that painting alone was inadequate to their representation. This, to our mind, prevents him from taking as high a place in art as he would have done had he been more purely a painter.
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