Manchester Murals

In Manchester Town Hall, the history of a city becomes a succession of crowded encounters: soldiers build a fort, a queen inspects cloth, townspeople upset an invading army, and children watch a scientist investigate a muddy pond. Ford Madox Brown worked on the twelve pictures from the commission’s beginnings in 1878–79 to the completion of the last painting in 1893. They became the principal undertaking of his later career. Their subjects connect Manchester with religion, trade, education, invention and scientific inquiry, while their small incidents repeatedly draw attention away from the famous name in the title. ^[1]

The murals also embody a practical argument about public art. Brown wanted pictures that people could understand and care about, made for the particular demands of a wall. Seven were painted directly on the walls in spirit fresco; five were painted on canvas for attachment to the building. Calling the entire cycle “frescoes” conceals that important change of method. ^[2]

A commission that became a second career

The architect Alfred Waterhouse and Manchester’s council planned historical murals for the new Town Hall. The painter Frederic Shields supported the choice of Brown, and the initial arrangement divided the twelve pictures between them, six apiece. The commission emerged in 1878–79. ^[3]

Brown’s grandson Ford Madox Hueffer supplies the fullest early narrative, including the artist’s letters. His account requires care: it defends Brown vigorously, and sometimes confuses historical facts or compresses the work’s material history. Nevertheless, the correspondence makes the difficulty of the undertaking unusually tangible. Brown arrived in a functioning municipal building, prepared wall surfaces, waited for medium, and worked in a movable enclosure raised to the level of the picture. He likened his working box to a box at the opera. It provided privacy but made it too easy to remain close to the surface without stepping back to judge the whole. ^[1]

There were immediate disagreements about what Manchester’s history should include. Some proposed episodes happened elsewhere; others depended on doubtful traditions. Brown acknowledged that Edwin had been baptised at York, yet insisted that the introduction of Christianity deserved representation. The council rejected his proposed Peterloo subject, and the opening of the Bridgewater Canal entered the scheme instead. That substitution mattered: civic history could accommodate the infrastructure of commercial growth more comfortably than a recent confrontation between political authority and a reform meeting. The rejection and Brown’s irritated response are documented in the correspondence; the contrast between the two possible subjects remains visible in the programme itself. ^[1]

The work also reorganised Brown’s household. He first travelled between London and Manchester before moving his household to the city in 1881. His letters connect the decision with living costs, working facilities and the hope of finding purchasers. He eventually returned to London in 1887 and completed the later canvases there. The story is more complicated than a celebrated artist simply receiving a prosperous civic commission. Brown hoped that the undertaking would support him, but repeatedly found that its demands exceeded its financial rewards. ^[1]

When Shields relinquished his six pictures, Brown took responsibility for the complete cycle. By the end of 1883 the negotiations had reached a decisive stage. Brown produced accounts showing how heavily the work had cost him and refused to continue at the original rate. The eventual compromise brought the payment to £375 per picture across the twelve, including retrospective additions for the earlier paintings. Hueffer also preserves Shields’s later explanation that he wanted the whole scheme to pass to Brown. Whatever the mixture of friendship, reluctance and negotiation behind the change, it gave the room a single painter’s sustained treatment. ^[1]

How Brown painted for a wall

Brown’s essay “Of Mural Painting,” published in 1893, provides the clearest account of his mature principles. A wall picture, he argued, should retain a sense of solidity rather than appear to make a hole through the building. He distrusted landscape decoration whose principal attraction was recession into distance, and warned against excessively dark subjects. Those opinions help explain the cycle’s emphasis on closely packed figures, emphatic gestures and clearly organised local incidents. They are principles expressed at the end of the project, rather than a recipe mechanically applied to every earlier design. He also insisted that, within a commission’s broad limits, the painter must choose and invent the actual subject: the artist knew which scenes could become effective pictures. ^[2]

His first method was spirit fresco, associated with Thomas Gambier Parry. It differs from buon fresco, in which pigment is applied to fresh plaster. Brown’s own testimony specifies seven Manchester works painted in the spirit-fresco system. Hueffer’s introductory footnote says that only the last four were canvases; that count conflicts with the seven wall paintings and with his subsequent narrative, which already identifies Chetham’s Life’s Dream as a canvas. The consistent division is seven wall paintings and five canvases, with Chetham beginning the canvas group. ^{[2] [1]}

Experience qualified Brown’s early enthusiasm. In July 1879 he complained that the medium continued drying and becoming paler for several weeks, making its eventual appearance hard to predict. The building also created changing conditions: projecting piers threw shadows across the painting, sunlight interfered, and gaslight was sometimes indispensable. The apparent assurance of the finished compositions therefore emerged from repeated adjustments to an awkward working environment. ^[1]

Canvas offered greater freedom. Brown could work in a studio, then have the completed painting adhered to the wall, a method called marouflage. His 1893 essay describes a white-lead-and-oil adhesive with a small addition of rosin, and explains that canvases could be painted in oil or prepared for the Gambier-Parry medium. These are the alternatives he discusses, rather than evidence that every Manchester canvas has precisely the same paint structure. He particularly valued the possibility of detaching a canvas if damp affected its attachment. ^[2]

The preparation combined historical reading with observed bodies and things. Hueffer records a bibliography for Wycliffe , an outdoor autumn study intended for Chetham , and Brown’s insistence on studying an unfamiliar brass instrument outdoors for the Roman scene. Within the hall he diffused light over models through oiled paper. Neither the historical subject nor the monumental setting removed his need to examine how an object caught light or how a person actually moved. ^[1]

Reading the twelve scenes

The following sequence follows the history represented, from Roman Manchester to Dalton’s investigations. It is not Brown’s order of execution. The making dates identify the installed pictures, rather than every drawing or smaller version associated with them. ^[1]

The Romans Building a Fort at Mancenion

The Roman scene was painted on the wall in 1880 , after the design had been worked out in 1879. Brown treats foundation as a construction site. The commanding figure holds a plan while men below shoulder, lift and place the heavy materials. A red cloak expands around the commander, but the bent backs in the foreground give the activity its physical weight. His own description distinguishes legionaries doing masonry from Britons compelled to carry stones and cement. ^[1]

Rank is acted out even in the subsidiary family group. The general’s wife has left her litter; their small son, dressed as a soldier, aims a kick at a bearer. Brown’s description identifies the bearer as an enslaved African. The action gives the child’s imitation of adult authority a disturbing edge. The city’s beginning is represented through unequal power as well as organised effort. Brown’s accompanying historical explanation contains an unreliable ancient chronology, so it should be read as evidence for his reconstruction, not used to date the Roman foundation independently. ^[1]

The Baptism of Edwin

The National Portrait Gallery dates the installed painting 1879–80 ; Hueffer records the main wall painting between April and July 1879. These statements concern the mural. The large paper cartoon has a separate, longer history. ^{[4] [1]}

Edwin kneels in a stone font, with his exposed body contrasting with the clothes and ceremonial equipment around him. Paulinus raises a hand, while the queen and her attendants watch from the other side. Behind the barrier, the congregation becomes a second subject: people peer, children fidget, and ceremony meets curiosity. Hueffer’s description draws attention to the incense-bearers’ imperfect solemnity and a child looking questioningly towards her mother. Brown’s crowd contains several degrees of attention rather than a single unanimous expression of belief. ^[1]

The baptism represented is at York in 627 , not Manchester. Brown explicitly acknowledged York in his explanation. The scene brings the city into a larger story of Christianisation through the kingdom to which it belonged. Even the imagined Roman pavement links this interior with the preceding Roman subject: the connection is Brown’s pictorial construction, not a surviving eyewitness record of the ceremony. ^[1]

The Expulsion of the Danes from Manchester

Painted in 1880–81 , this is the cycle’s most conspicuously unruly military scene. Brown describes a wounded young chief carried towards safety while his companions run a gauntlet of missiles. A woman throws a tile, an older inhabitant casts a spear, and boys pour water from above. Escaping pigs disrupt the retreat, bringing armed men down in a heap. ^[1]

The energy depends on collisions: the stretched body of the wounded man, shields held overhead, bodies falling below, and attacks arriving from windows. The defenders are not confined to soldiers. Household space itself becomes a position from which residents intervene. Yet the comedy of the pig is placed beside a potentially fatal injury; the invaders are also vulnerable young bodies attempting to escape. ^[1]

This imagined early medieval episode should not be treated as securely documented local reportage. In the correspondence Hueffer prints, Brown himself acknowledges the historical doubt attached to the Danes subject. The uncertainty is part of the cycle’s history, rather than a reason to mistake its vividness for proof. ^[1]

The Establishment of Flemish Weavers in Manchester

The wall painting was made in 1881–82 , following the cartoon of 1881. The familiar historical date 1363 belongs to the represented subject. Brown’s own account uses the language of tradition for Philippa’s connection with the weavers; the royal visit is an imagined embodiment of that relationship. ^{[1] [5]}

Queen Philippa examines green cloth held out by a weaving family. The touch of her hand joins royal patronage to a material whose quality has to be judged. Brown gives the queen’s attendants flowering hawthorn and describes them as returning from a spring outing. Across the composition, the presentation at the left is balanced by the shaded workshop at the right. ^[1]

As in the baptism, official attention is only one kind of looking. Brown describes a master watching for the queen while his apprentice watches the master’s daughter, who occupies herself with a kitten. Children imperfectly perform the deference expected of them. The composition’s larger proposition is that textile knowledge arrives with people; its smaller incidents insist that these people have affections and distractions beyond their assigned place in civic history. The Flemish Weavers picture also exists as a separate reduced design, discussed below. ^[1]

The Trial of Wycliffe

The wall painting belongs to 1885–86 . Brown transferred the design in 1885, interrupted the work to paint Chetham , and returned to it the following year. It represents Wycliffe’s appearance at Old St Paul’s in 1377 , defended by John of Gaunt: the action takes place in London, with the Lancaster connection bringing it into Manchester’s civic narrative. ^[1]

Brown sets opposing bodies and gestures against the church architecture. The seated ecclesiastical authority on one side confronts the cluster around Wycliffe and his protector. In the artist’s explanation, Constance restrains her husband by his mantle; other figures argue, read or observe. Chaucer is included taking notes. These are elements of Brown’s historical staging, and Chaucer’s presence in the painting is not proof that he witnessed the proceeding. ^[1]

The research was extensive, but the final encounter remains a designed drama. Brown also brought familiar contemporary faces into it: Hueffer identifies Shields as the model for Wycliffe and Brown himself as the Bishop of London. The latter identification is retained in the National Portrait Gallery’s iconography. The artist could embody the opponent of his sympathetic historical protagonist, a useful warning against treating every portrait likeness as a declaration of allegiance. ^{[1] [4]}

The Proclamation Regarding Weights and Measures

This wall painting was begun in 1883 and completed by the spring of 1884 . Its 1881 cartoon and an oil repetition finished in 1889 are separate stages and objects. ^[1]

The council identifies its subject as a 1556 order requiring Manchester’s weights and measures to be submitted for testing against the royal standard. ^[6]

Brown makes regulation into a public encounter. A speaker leans out above a parapet while people gather below; vessels, a large circular object and an extended measuring rod give the administrative subject a material vocabulary. The long diagonal across the foreground binds the two sides of the scene. Its relationship to the weavers is particularly useful: making a desirable commodity is one part of commercial life, while agreeing how quantities are checked is another. This reading follows the visible arrangement rather than identifying every depicted implement as a surviving historical instrument.

Crabtree Watching the Transit of Venus

Brown painted the mural in 1882–83 . Its subject is William Crabtree’s observation of the transit in 1639 . Brown’s description gives 24 November , the Old Style date. The important pictorial distinction is that Crabtree observes a projected solar image rather than staring directly at the sun; the reconstructed room and surrounding actions belong to Brown’s historical imagination. ^[1]

The familiar composition, also represented by a separate smaller painting, encloses the discovery in an ordinary interior. A narrow beam reaches the projection while Crabtree bends towards it, his raised hands arrested by what he sees. A family group gathers on the other side. The woman restrains a child whose movement might disturb the observation. Books, textiles, timber and domestic clutter share the room with the equipment. Brown described the setting as a storeroom above the draper’s business, imagined for the scene. ^[1]

Discovery therefore appears as an interruption within household life. The observer’s absorption is matched by the work of keeping the child back; two different kinds of vigilance occupy the picture. The Crabtree composition deserves close attention for this relationship between an exceptional observation and the people who make space for it.

Chetham’s Life’s Dream

The first of the five canvas murals was begun in 1885 and finished in February 1886 . The pastel made from its cartoon in 1889 is a different object. Brown represents the merchant Humphrey Chetham considering his will while imagining the boys who will benefit from his educational provision. ^[1]

The title is essential. This is an imagined future filling a garden, not a record of Chetham sitting among an already established school. The seated benefactor and his document occupy one side, while boys spread through the space in activities Brown names as reading, drilling, wrestling, leapfrog and a game of stools. The will becomes bodies in motion. ^[1]

The great tree and open ground allow the school’s imagined life to expand beyond the still figure contemplating it. Brown includes the practical support of a cook and anticipated provisions as well as the attractions of play. Education takes material form through food, supervision, books and room to move. It offers a different use of mercantile wealth from accumulation alone, while retaining the dependence of the children on a wealthy donor’s decision. ^[1]

Bradshaw’s Defence of Manchester

This was the final mural, painted on canvas in 1892–93 and completed in March 1893. Its place in the historical sequence is earlier: it represents Manchester’s defence in the Civil War. Hueffer’s account repeats the attribution of leadership to Bradshaw. ^[1]

That identification needs correction. Manchester City Council’s caption explicitly identifies Colonel Rosworm , rather than Bradshaw, as the defender against Lord Strange’s Royalist forces. The traditional title records the painting’s history; it should not determine the historical explanation. ^[7]

The composition brings battle down to a confined crossing, where a fallen horse and struggling men dominate the foreground. Smoke and fire interrupt the view along the bridge. Brown’s explanation gives the distant firing figure the role of Bradshaw, while the conspicuous unhorsed gentleman in front remains only tentatively identified even in that account. It is a scene of obstructed movement, difficult rescue and confused bodies rather than a commanding portrait of a victorious leader. The uncertainty over the foreground figure and the correction to the title should remain distinct: one concerns Brown’s identification within the picture, the other the history it claims to represent. ^[1]

John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle

Brown began the large canvas in 1888 . Hueffer records its painting as finished in November 1889 and the completed canvas exhibited in March 1890, so 1888–90 usefully preserves the work’s successive stages. The scene dramatises the traditional account of Kay being smuggled away from rioters in a woollen sheet. ^[1]

The invention does not produce an uncomplicated triumph. On one side, an intruder forces his way into the room; on the other, several people struggle with the awkward bundle containing the inventor. Kay reaches towards his wife for a kiss. The sheet simultaneously hides him and exposes his dependence on others. Brown gives the dramatic mechanism of escape a physical absurdity without removing the threat that makes escape necessary. ^[1]

The textile story has changed since Philippa’s visit. Incoming skill was welcomed there; here a device that increases output generates fear and violence. Brown’s written explanation also blames employers who resisted Kay’s royalties. He does not assign all the cost of invention to a single hostile crowd. The scene is built from a received story, however, and its theatrical detail should not be mistaken for a documented account of every movement in Kay’s house. ^[1]

The Opening of the Bridgewater Canal

The canvas was painted in 1891–92 , following the cartoon begun after John Kay . It represents the canal opening at Barton Aqueduct in 1761 . Brown had resisted this subject early in the commission, yet eventually turned it into a densely populated waterside event. ^[1]

The barges and their occupants bring engineering into the realm of movement and use. Brown’s account places the Duke of Bridgewater and James Brindley beside the working boat, while the bargee’s wife steers with two babies secured on the cabin roof. A small customer waiting for coal gives the transport system an everyday destination. The official party and the labour that makes the event happen remain within the same crowded field. ^[1]

Read beside Kay , the canal offers another picture of technological change. Instead of an isolated inventor threatened inside a house, it shows a network: designer, financier, crew, animals, boats and customers. Its celebratory appearance does not make it an impersonal diagram of progress. Brown continually restores the bodily and domestic details that infrastructure tends to hide. ^[1]

Dalton Collecting Marsh-Fire Gas

The canvas was begun in 1886 and completed in 1887 . Although it is the last subject in the historical arrangement, it was finished several years before the cycle’s final painting. Brown does not establish a precise date for the particular pond-side experiment he depicts. ^[1]

Dalton works with a long pole while a boy catches rising gas in an inverted vessel. Children look on from the bank; another child has interests of his own at the water’s edge. The strong horizontal bank and the overarching tree hold this scattered group together. Brown’s explanation makes the activity a demonstration of collecting bubbles disturbed from the mud, with a saucer ready to close the vessel underwater. ^[1]

The scene offers a particularly modest form of scientific monument. Dalton’s achievement is approached through bending, stirring, collecting and watching. Brown’s words connect the investigation of gases with the chemist’s larger work, but do not justify treating this as the exact instant when atomic theory was discovered. The Dalton composition ends the sequence with an open-air investigation in which practical assistance and youthful curiosity share the scientist’s space. ^[1]

Cartoons, small designs and later versions

A mural title can refer to several different physical works. The National Gallery of Victoria’s The Baptism of Edwin, King of Northumbria is a monumental paper cartoon , dated 1879–91 , in pastel, coloured chalks and grey gouache. It measures 146.5 × 318.5 cm and entered the Melbourne collection through the Felton Bequest in 1905 . It is not the Manchester wall painting removed from its setting. ^[8]

The date range belongs to that particular sheet. It does not mean Brown spent twelve years continuously painting the baptism on the Town Hall wall. The distinction is especially clear when the museum record is set beside his early mural chronology. Readers can explore the separate Baptism cartoon as a work with its own materials and later development. ^{[8] [1]}

Manchester Art Gallery similarly dates its small tempera-on-panel Flemish Weavers design 1881 and 1888 . The gallery explains that Brown prepared it before the mural, then completed it afterwards for sale. Those two dates describe the panel’s working history; the installed wall painting was completed in 1882. ^{[9] [1]}

Hueffer records comparable transformations elsewhere: the Weights and Measures cartoon became an oil repetition in December 1889, and the Chetham cartoon became a pastel that September. Brown’s July 1879 letter had already weighed the saleability of a smaller coloured design against a cumbersome cartoon. The preparatory object could be an instrument of making, a record of the invention and a potential source of income, with those functions changing over time. ^[1]

These distinctions also matter when looking at reproductions. A photograph of a smaller version can explain a composition without documenting the installed mural’s scale, surface or condition. A paper cartoon, a tempera panel and a wall painting should keep their own captions even when their figures look familiar.

Civic pride and an unsettled picture of progress

The series grants Manchester a long past, but its history does not proceed through twelve uncontested achievements. Roman organisation includes compelled labour. The introduction of Christianity includes resistant or distracted spectators. Textile skill is welcomed in one picture, while mechanical innovation brings fear in another. Education depends on a benefaction, and scientific knowledge depends on patient manual activity. Those tensions arise within Brown’s subjects and their detailed staging. ^[1]

His activities outside the Town Hall sharpen the social context. In an April 1886 letter to Shields, Brown described addressing a large meeting of unemployed men at Pomona Gardens and helping to establish a labour bureau. Workers registered, he reported, but employers responded in far smaller numbers. He accused manufacturers of treating a reserve of hungry workers as necessary to cheap labour. This is Brown’s own contemporary statement, rather than a political position inferred solely from the paintings. ^[1]

Colin Trodd’s later interpretation places ordinary people’s encounters with larger powers at the centre of the cycle. In a University of Manchester account accompanying his 2022 book, he emphasises vitality, freedom and the combination of serious history with comedy. That account provides a useful critical alternative to reading the murals simply as municipal self-congratulation. ^[10]

Brown himself offered a revealing test of public response. In “Of Mural Painting” he recalled visitors mistaking the wounded Dane for someone who had fallen from a ladder and was being carried away by police. They had misunderstood the costume and event, yet grasped misfortune and assistance. He accepted that sympathetic recognition as a meaningful response. His insistence that publicly funded subjects should engage their audience coexisted with condescension towards that audience’s education; both attitudes belong to his account. He also separated the appeal of religious pictures from the piety of their makers or viewers, locating their force in “poetry and humanity.” The baptism and the religious dispute can therefore be approached through human responses as well as through the beliefs represented. ^[2]

The reception during his lifetime was mixed. Hueffer prints enthusiastic reports from Charles Rowley as well as complaints about hostile criticism. Brown’s own 1887 letter resists the idea that Manchester had simply refused him recognition: he lists honours, invitations and public introductions, even while worrying about a cooling response. Neither complete neglect nor universal civic acclaim adequately describes the evidence. ^[1]

Conservation has brought renewed attention to the pictures as parts of a building. A September 2024 council report records Hirst Conservation’s public lecture on its work on the Town Hall’s internal painted finishes, including the murals. The lecture formed part of a wider heritage programme documenting the building’s restoration and the skills involved. ^[11]

The cycle extends the crowded social vision of Work into an architectural setting. Its later place in Brown’s career should not make it an appendix to the earlier easel paintings. Here he sustained a public historical project through changing methods, negotiations and successive compositions, while keeping the small, difficult, funny business of being human in view. ^[1]