Ford Madox Brown: Pre-Raphaelite Pioneer ed. by Julian Treuherz (review)

Julian Treuherz’s substantial book Ford Madox Brown: Pre-Raphaelite Pioneer and his no less extensive exhibition of the same name at Manchester Art Gallery (from 24 September 2011 to 29 January 2012) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent (from 25 February to 3 June 2012) signal a decisive event in nineteenth-century studies: the introduction of Ford Madox Brown as an individual onto the mainstream and international stage. This book and exhibition coincide with the appearance of half a century of research into the artist by Mary Bennett in her magisterial two-volume Ford Madox Brown: A Catalogue Raisonné brought out by Yale and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in 2010. This sea-change was signalled by Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery’s smaller show and critical catalogue Ford Madox Brown: The Unofficial Pre-Raphaelite (2008), the first since Bennett’s retrospective in 1964, and a flurry of other publications, notably Angela Thirlwell’s Into the Frame: The Four Loves of Ford Madox Brown (2010) and Tim Barringer’s chapter in The Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites (2012).

Treuherz and his publishers have admirably defied the trend for more slender economical catalogues, catalogues lites if you like, that have tended to fillet exhibition publications over recent years. Neither index, bibliography, nor chronology are left out and the book includes four essays and individual entries on 152 works, each helpfully labelled with its catalogue raisonné number. The writing is engaging and efficiently informed and does not fall into the trap of overlapping catalogue and essay content. This welcome generosity reflects the breadth and novelty of Brown’s oeuvre. The book begins with tenebrist portraits made as a fifteen-year-old student at Ghent Academy of Fine Arts and ends with the last visionary history painting for Manchester Town Hall completed months before his death. As well as paintings and Brown’s distinctively tender drawings, it includes furniture, stained glass, and all twelve of the ambitious scheme of murals (six of them fresco) in the Town Hall which was part of the Manchester venue.

This range of objects illustrates the more inclusive, interdisciplinary approach that is informing acquisition, loan, and display policies in British galleries, and the book exemplifies the potential of interdisciplinary scholarship to play a complementary role. Treuherz’s book goes further than the catalogue raisonné in this respect, presenting the works contextually through sections and essays. His bravura beginning to the volume, “Ford Madox Brown—Pre-Raphaelite Pioneer” introduces a European-born Brown, brought up and trained on the Continent, and links his art to German, Belgian, French, and British literature and art. Thirlwell’s “The Game of Life” reminds us that Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine attended Brown’s London salons. She gives us a man of the world in a different sense, experienced and exploratory in romantic and social relationships as well as art. This essay side-steps conventional biography to offer instead a virtuoso exegesis of Brown’s replies to the parlour Game of Life: “Favourite hero? Goliath,” “Ambition? To be mistaken for a swell.” “Favourite colour? Magenta,” for example, points to both Brown’s commitment to newly invented, hot industrial pinks and hints at the struggle for Italian independence after which they were named (Battle of Magenta, Battle of Solferino) (24).

The other essays, “Ford Madox Brown’s Humour” by Kenneth Bendiner and “Ford Madox Brown in Manchester” by Treuherz, update, expand, and make newly accessible their earlier ground-breaking work on these topics. They open Brown’s literary and historical iconography into broader territory, and his socialist ideas are important to both accounts. For Bendiner, contradiction, irony, and subversion are, as well as political satire, an aspect of his experimental bent. The nurse pulling grass from a field to feed the lambs from a basket in Pretty Baa Lambs (1851–59) is no less acerbic a play on artifice and nature in the modern world than Édouard Manet...