Lear and Cordelia

A white-haired man sleeps across a richly furnished bed. At his feet, a young woman extends both hands towards him, while musicians and anxious attendants wait behind. The man is King Lear; the woman is the daughter he rejected. In Lear and Cordelia , Ford Madox Brown places the possibility of reconciliation before us while withholding the moment when the father will recognise his child.

Tate dates the oil painting 1849–1854. ^[1]

That span reflects a work repeatedly reconsidered after its first exhibition, as Brown’s diary shows. ^[2]

The subject comes from Act IV, scene vii of Shakespeare’s King Lear . ^[3]

This reunion differs from the opening rejection in Brown’s Cordelia’s Portion . ^[4]

Brown turns the scene into an interval of concentrated waiting: affection is unmistakable, but recovery has yet to be proved. ^[5]

The moment before recognition

Cordelia has returned to Britain with the French forces. Her father, exhausted by exposure and distress, is being cared for in the French camp. Shakespeare gives the doctor charge of his awakening and calls for music. Lear’s eventual recognition leads him to ask Cordelia’s forgiveness; her answer refuses to hold his earlier cruelty against him. ^[3]

Brown’s 1865 explanation, reproduced by his grandson Ford Madox Hueffer, locates the picture just before this recovery of consciousness. He describes Cordelia waiting for the effect her presence will have on Lear. The sleeping face is therefore essential. Brown suspends the action before the recognition that a reader of the play expects, giving the surrounding figures time to reveal their concern. ^[5]

The arrangement also changes the play’s physical staging. Shakespeare’s direction brings Lear on in a chair carried by servants; Brown stretches him across a bed. The Fool, included prominently by the painter, does not appear among the characters in this scene of the play. These choices make the picture an interpretation of the episode, gathering its human relationships into a single space. ^{[3] [5]}

A royal body made vulnerable

The bed occupies almost the full width of the foreground. Lear’s head sinks into a gold-coloured cushion, his white beard merging with his pale clothing. One arm hangs over the edge, its hand close to the spectator. The other bends against his body. Brown gives the old man weight and awkwardness: the exposed forearm and relaxed fingers make his helplessness more immediate than an elaborate gesture of despair would. His crown rests beyond him, near Cordelia, while his body fills the space beneath it. Brown’s explanation repeatedly stresses Lear’s age and dependence. ^[5]

Cordelia’s upright silhouette answers this long reclining figure. Her red covering encloses her head and shoulders, then gives way to pale arms and a dark, patterned outer garment. Her hands reach across the space at the foot of the bed without closing it. Their openness supplies the movement that Lear cannot yet return. The distance matters: Brown makes us look from her face down her arms and along the bed towards his sleeping head. That slow passage through the composition prolongs her waiting. ^[5]

Behind them, people crowd a much narrower band. Brown identifies the Fool and the disguised Kent among these watchers. The Fool leans forward, his bright cap and intent downward gaze drawing attention to the sleeper; Kent stands beside him. At the left, the physician raises an arm beside his open book. Brown describes him as a figure combining medicine with magic, a characterisation belonging to the painter’s imagined historical world. Their different occupations—watching, treating, playing music—converge upon the same motionless patient. ^[5]

The opening of the tent allows a glimpse of the coast and encampment. It gives the crowded interior air and distance, yet the principal figures remain close to the picture surface. The sea and tents locate the rescue within a military setting; inside, the scale of the drama has contracted to the response of one father to one daughter. Brown’s 1865 description supplies both the Dover context and the anxious family encounter. ^[5]

Red, gold and a deliberately invented past

Brown carries deep red from Cordelia’s head covering into the bedding. Against these larger masses, the pale tones of Lear’s head and shirt and Cordelia’s forearms become especially clear. Gold and ochre occur across the cushion, clothing, tent and furniture. Small patterns keep interrupting broad areas of colour: the border of the bed, the hanging fabric, the crown and the decoration of Cordelia’s garment all reward a slower look. The splendour of the setting intensifies the contrast with its helpless occupant. It is an interpretation consistent with Brown’s stated contrast between royal circumstance and the stricken old man. ^[5]

The historical setting was consciously assembled. In his 1865 explanation Brown considered the difficulty of clothing Shakespeare’s characters. The play combines an ancient British story with customs that do not belong neatly to one period. Brown said he chose European costume of about the sixth century to correspond with what he understood as the drama’s harsh moral atmosphere. This is his artistic solution to Shakespeare’s mixed historical world, rather than evidence of exactly what ancient Britons wore. ^[5]

Most revealingly, he acknowledged that the piece of Bayeux tapestry behind Lear was “strictly an anachronism”. Brown wanted its young men riding with hawk and hound to contrast with the elderly king. That band of vigorous activity sits immediately above the body on the bed. The comparison works even before its source is recognised: the eye moves between figures pursuing an active life and a man temporarily unable to act. Brown valued the emotional relationship between the two registers enough to retain a historical inconsistency he openly understood. ^[5]

His interpretation of Cordelia was equally deliberate, and more debatable. Brown imagined her recalling the opening scene, when her honesty had hardened into pride and prevented the affectionate words Lear expected. He summed up the danger as “virtue, too, has its shadowed side, pride”. This is Brown’s judgment of the character, not an uncontested explanation of Shakespeare’s tragedy. It gives his bedside scene a particular emphasis: Cordelia’s outstretched hands can be read as the generous expression that the painter believed her earlier speech had failed to supply. ^[5]

From the Paris drawings to the painted bedside

MacCulloch identifies Birmingham’s 1844 Cordelia at Lear’s Bedside as brown pen and ink over pencil, signed in Paris; it first brought the drawing sequence into paint. ^[4]

The composition had a life before the canvas. Brown’s Paris drawings place this apparently intimate picture within a sustained study of the whole drama.

MacCulloch notes the drawing’s awake Lear and the painting’s more explicit coastal tent setting. ^[4]

There is a crucial difference between drawing and painting. In the 1844 drawing Lear can meet Cordelia’s gaze. The painting’s suspense emerges from that alteration: the early design gives the encounter itself, whereas the later work holds its outcome in reserve.

MacCulloch compares Brown’s tent and musicians with Friedrich August Moritz Retzsch’s Lear’s Awakening , and his reclining father with an engraving after Henry Fuseli. ^[4]

These are specific visual comparisons, not proof that Brown copied one complete design. They show how a young artist could combine possibilities found in earlier images while changing the spatial and emotional balance. Brown’s drawings are particularly valuable for following those decisions.

MacCulloch separately catalogues Cordelia Parting from her Sisters : a March 1850 Germ etching from another 1844 design. ^[4]

His other Lear subjects must be kept distinct. That etching shows the separation following the opening rejection, rather than this bedside reunion. The repetition of the same names across Brown’s titles can obscure how differently each work treats the relationship.

Repainting faces, hands and proportions

Brown’s diary shows that the painted figures were constructed through persistent work from models. In November 1848 he repeatedly composed the scene; in December he began transferring its outline to canvas and studied Cordelia’s figure. The January 1849 entries record the sea, cliffs, ships and tents, followed by individual heads and hands. This was a process of building and revising parts, rather than simply enlarging the 1844 drawing. ^[2]

Dante Gabriel Rossetti sat for the Fool’s head. Brown recorded painting it from him on 27 January and again on 1 March 1849. Lear’s head drew upon a cast of Dante and a drawing associated with another model, Coulton. Such entries explain why the characters need not be portraits of single sitters. Brown brought separate studies together to produce a convincing fictional company. ^[2]

Cordelia was especially troublesome. Brown repeatedly painted and removed her head before recording its completion on 21 March 1849. ^[2]

MacCulloch identifies Cordelia’s hands below Infant’s Repast studies on one sheet. She leaves their model uncertain: Emma Hill is proposed, but Mrs Ashley also sat. ^[4]

The evidence supports close study of a living body, without establishing that every part of Cordelia came from one named woman.

The diary gives an unusually clear sequence of apparent completion followed by renewed dissatisfaction. Brown took the painting to the Free Exhibition on 22 March 1849, continued working on it there, and next day repainted the sky and declared it finished. Later that year he altered Cordelia’s proportions, shortening her arms and hands while enlarging her head and thickening her figure. He sent it to Manchester in 1853, where it remained unsold. In his retrospective account of 1853–1854, he records substantial further repainting before the picture’s auction sale to John Pollard Seddon. Tate’s extended date preserves something of that restless making history. In 1865 Brown still counted the picture among his chief works. ^{[5] [2]}

A composition revisited

Brown returned to the bedside composition in smaller versions after the Tate canvas was sold. In December 1855 he recorded beginning a small King Lear from a drawing made for an unfinished etching of the picture in Seddon’s possession. His entry includes a practical difficulty: the purple paint ran, forcing him to work with the canvas horizontal. The problem troubled this later small picture, rather than the canvas now at Tate. ^[2]

Hueffer reproduces the diary’s continuation in January 1856. The dealer David Thomas White asked Brown to reduce the redness of several heads and Cordelia’s hands in this reduction; Brown complied, and White bought it. The episode helps explain why repeated compositions may differ in colour and finish. White’s objections also give a glimpse of the negotiations that could accompany Brown’s repetitions of an earlier design. ^[5]

Brown’s Shakespearean work also extended to Romeo and Juliet and, much later, the theatre itself. The programme for Henry Irving’s 1892 King Lear credits Brown’s designs for Lear’s palace and the castles of Gloucester and Albany, as Alexander Thom documents from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s collections. The bedside canvas belongs to his earlier exploration of the tragedy, several decades before these designs for the stage. ^[6]