The Art of Ford Madox Brown (review)

Ford Madox Brown has never quite belonged. As Kenneth Bendiner observes, Brown was “a Pre-Raphaelite who never became a Pre-Raphaelite Brother, an Englishman raised abroad, a foreign-trained artist in England, a founder of the decorating firm of Morris, Marshall, and Faulkner who was eventually cut out of the business” (36). Nor has Brown been assigned a secure place in Victorian art history.

Bendiner’s project in The Art of Ford Madox Brown is to establish a firm reputation for Brown, simply to get hold of this elusive artist. In its organization into separate discussions of “Archaism,” “Humor,” “Realism,” “Aestheticism,” and “A Social Conscience,” the study acknowledges the discontinuity of Brown’s career, his movement through a series of new stylistic beginnings. Within these sections Bendiner’s method, as in his previous work on Victorian art, is resolutely contextual, situating Brown quite productively within issues as they appeared to an artist in nineteenth-century England, rather than to scholars looking backwards within the narrative(s) of Modernism. The study is excellent in parsing quite specifically Brown’s debts to contemporary artistic movements, such as the Nazarenes, the PRB, and to aestheticism as evidenced in his paintings and Manchester murals of the 1880s and 1890s. This contextualizing commendably opens up our understanding of Brown by showing how, for example, archaism became synonymous with realism in the 1840s and in explicating the complex meanings of realism for the English artist through the century. Yet such analysis often prompts extended detours, moving from discussion of Brown to rehearsing the history of the PRB or the Arts and Crafts movement or aestheticism.

Yet the question remains as to whether there is any coherence to this Brownian stylistic motion. Paradoxically, Bendiner finds the center of Brown’s career in its very lack of a center, in what he terms the artist’s “negativism” (87), in what the author throughout calls Brown’s “comedy” or “humor.” Although the term “humor” is somewhat limiting, Bendiner does point to a way of accounting for the enigmatic quality, the strangeness, of Brown’s art. In spite of his rather curmudgeonly attitude to theory, Bendiner praises Brown for what a contemporary critic might call a subversive and self-reflexive critique of the movements of his time. For Bendiner, Brown demands recognition as the great deconstructionist of Victorian art.

In a nice stylistic observation, Bendiner sees in Brown’s “violent changes of color, rather than symphonies in red and yellow” (48) and “writhing multiplicity of colorful details” (49) a basic “yen for disorder” (49). He sees such vision as connected to the Pre-Raphaelite habit of perception, the Brotherhood’s sense of the “real” that fundamentally challenges “the habits of hierarchical seeing” (51). Bendiner also notes the subversive quality in Brown’s habit of including material that does not seem stylistically or thematically consistent. Here, quite persuasively, he describes Pretty Baa-Lambs (1851), a progressive out-of-doors painting filled with Rococo shepherdesses, as stylistically undecidable. Is it, he asks, “a truculent declaration of realism, or a humorous spoof?” (30).

Bendiner’s thesis, that Brown’s consistency lies in “humor,” in working within and yet undercutting styles, does allow us to be a bit less earnest about Brown’s work. Brown does seem to be poking fun at the art worlds that, as a foreigner, he passed through with an ironic distance free of the solemn obsessiveness of a William Holman Hunt. In the Manchester Town Hall mural, Expulsion of the Danes from Manchester (1881), that the Danes fleeing Manchester “trip over squealing pigs, and get hit in the head by bricks and water” (25) is seen as Brown’s joke at the solemnity of Victorian history painting, “a great historical event laughably undignified” (25). And Bendiner sees Work (1852–65) as a “collection of figures [. . .] so motley and conflicting that the suburban street representing England looks like a madhouse” (26). The philosophers of work standing idly at the side are...