Romeo and Juliet

Romeo is already leaving, but his face has turned back for a kiss. One leg reaches down outside the balcony; an arm extends towards the pale sky. Juliet holds him across the chest, drawing the movement back towards the open window. In Romeo and Juliet , Ford Madox Brown makes an embrace and an escape happen in the same narrow space.

The Delaware Art Museum dates its large oil painting 1869–1870. ^[1]

The subject is Shakespeare’s dawn parting after the lovers’ wedding night, in Act III, scene v. Romeo must leave Verona following his killing of Tybalt. This is a marriage interrupted by banishment, rather than the earlier balcony courtship. Recognising the moment changes the picture: the brightening sky threatens the lovers’ remaining time together. ^[2]

The morning they cannot postpone

At the beginning of Shakespeare’s scene, Juliet tries to persuade Romeo that the bird they hear is a nightingale. He recognises the lark and the approaching day. The argument is tender but dangerous: remaining in Verona puts his life at risk. When Romeo agrees to stay and accept that risk, Juliet reverses herself and urges him to leave. Their words continually change direction because neither love nor self-preservation can settle the matter. ^[2]

Brown gives that hesitation a physical form. Romeo’s head turns towards Juliet while the rest of his body is committed to descent. The sky appears at the end of his extended arm, giving a visible destination to the gesture described by Brown’s grandson and biographer, Ford Madox Hueffer: Romeo points towards the eastern light while still embracing his wife. Hueffer identifies the scene explicitly as Act III, scene v. ^[3]

The picture gathers several beats of the dialogue into one pose. The pointing arm recalls Romeo’s recognition of dawn early in the scene; the kiss and ladder anticipate the departure that follows the Nurse’s warning of Lady Capulet’s approach. Shakespeare gives Romeo the words, “Farewell, farewell. One kiss and I’ll descend.” Brown holds him at the edge between that last kiss and the action it promises. ^[2]

Knowing what follows adds pressure without requiring Brown to include another character. After Romeo descends, Juliet imagines him lying dead in a tomb. Soon her parents demand that she marry Paris. The painting leaves those events outside its frame, concentrating on the brief interval in which the lovers can still touch. Its tenderness belongs to a scene already turning towards fear and separation. ^[2]

An embrace balanced over a drop

The narrow upright format makes the action look difficult. Juliet stands inside the window and balcony enclosure. Romeo crosses it, with his upper body close to hers and a red-stockinged leg stretching down the outside of the wall. The rope ladder remains conspicuous near the lower right corner. His escape has a practical mechanism, and the depth below the balcony is something the viewer has to imagine beyond the painting’s edge.

The parapet interrupts the couple’s bodies. A heavy block at the left supports the folds of Juliet’s yellow dress; the red railing cuts across Romeo’s lower body. The lovers are close enough to fill almost the whole width, yet the architecture prevents their embrace from becoming a relaxed, self-contained group. Looking down from their faces brings the eye to a man whose footing is already outside the room.

Their arms tell a different story from their legs. Juliet’s pale forearm crosses the red of Romeo’s clothing, and her hand rests against his side. Her other arm rises near the window frame. Romeo’s outstretched arm, wrapped in the broad curve of a sleeve, extends past her hold. The two actions remain legible at once: she draws him towards her, and he acknowledges the world that is taking him away.

Delaware links the composition’s “dramatic awkwardness” with its figures’ immediacy. ^[1]

The stance feels less like an effortless romantic emblem when one follows the weight through the bent body, the balcony and the descending leg. The embrace is affecting partly because it is so difficult to maintain.

The cloth has an equally active role. Juliet’s yellow folds fall over the solid balcony block, while the warm red fabric around Romeo’s shoulder curls out towards the sky. Small pale flowers cross his darker clothing. These interruptions prevent the two costumes from reading as simple areas of red and yellow; the eye keeps catching at a fold, a hand or a blossom. Hueffer later praised the composition as an especially strong example of what Brown called the “amorous line.” The phrase describes a pleasure in contour, but the contour here also carries a precarious movement. ^[3]

Dawn beyond the room

The window at the upper left is dark, framed by patterned glass and warm masonry. A draped fabric hangs against the wall behind the lovers. To the right, the composition opens abruptly into a pale, comparatively empty sky above distant buildings. The figures occupy the boundary between a private interior and the exposed city. Romeo’s arm crosses that boundary before his body has completed the journey.

Light is more than the setting for a romantic encounter. In Shakespeare’s dialogue, the lovers try to rename what they see and hear in order to delay its consequences. They cannot make the sky dark again. Brown’s broad strip of morning allows the viewer to see the evidence against Juliet’s wish that the night should continue; it is a quiet expanse beside an urgently tangled group. ^[2]

Hueffer describes Verona’s towers against a grey and yellow dawn, with darkness lingering in the garden below. That contrast is important to the painting’s spatial effect: the distant city is clearly silhouetted, while foliage and branches crowd the lower foreground. Morning has reached the skyline before it has cleared the garden. ^[3]

Delaware identifies apple blossom and connects its detail with Pre-Raphaelite nature study. ^[1]

The flowering branches deserve a slower look. A branch crosses the lower balcony, bringing delicate pale shapes in front of the hard masonry. It ties small natural forms to the larger scene, keeping the balcony part of a living garden.

Models, photographs and an invented Verona

Christie’s identifies Emma Brown as Juliet’s model, Charles Augustus Howell as Romeo’s, and photographs borrowed from Dante Gabriel Rossetti for the Verona background. ^[4]

Those identifications concern the design; they do not establish separate sittings for every version.

The combination is revealing. A pose drawn from a living person and architecture studied through photographs can coexist within an invented dramatic setting. Brown constructs an environment in which an embrace, an escape route and the visible approach of dawn can be read together. The photographic aid helped him give a fictional encounter a tangible architectural setting.

Brown’s own brief promise to the commissioning collector was more direct. As Hueffer records it, he wrote, “you must expect a scene of passion.” The remark fits the picture’s immediate physical subject. The emotional situation comes from Shakespeare; Brown gives it bodies and a place, with the lovers’ competing desires expressed through the arrangement of their limbs. ^[3]

Four versions, different histories

Christie’s places the first watercolour at the Whitworth and dates it 1867. ^[4]

Frederick Craven, a Manchester collector who favoured the medium, commissioned it. Hueffer describes it as a finished study for a larger painting, but his account also makes clear that it was a substantial purchase in its own right. The watercolour and oil belonged to a working pattern in which one composition could serve different collectors. ^[3]

Hueffer records the larger oil as begun in October 1867 and completed in July 1870 for James Leathart, Brown’s Newcastle patron. ^[3]

Delaware dates its canvas 1869–1870. ^[1]

The records give different starting years, while agreeing on completion in 1870. Retaining that distinction is more informative than treating every date attached to the composition as interchangeable.

Hueffer also distinguishes elapsed years from time spent painting. He estimates about four months’ continuous work on the oil, spread across the longer period, and records a price of £325. His calculation places Romeo and Juliet inside Brown’s ordinary business of commissions and repeat versions. A long span on a label need not mean uninterrupted daily work on one canvas. ^[3]

Christie’s dates a smaller watercolour and bodycolour with gum arabic 1868–1871, sold to James Anderson Rose in April 1871 for sixty guineas. ^[4]

This is a separate object with its own material description and ownership history. Its measurements and later auction appearances do not describe the Delaware oil.

The smaller picture also exposes how provisional the word “finished” could be. Hueffer mentions a small duplicate in Brown’s correspondence in 1868, describes the small watercolour as finished in February 1869, and returns to its completion in his account of 1871. The repeated appearances help explain an extended date without requiring the assumption that there were several otherwise undocumented small pictures. Brown could bring a version to a finished state and subsequently work on it again. ^[3]

Christie’s also records a Bradford monochrome dated 1876. ^[4]

The shared title therefore names a composition as well as several physical works. Seeing the image under a late date, or beside a watercolour’s sale history, can easily conceal those differences. The full-colour oil discussed here remains the Delaware painting.

A Shakespeare picture with a wider afterlife

Hueffer reports that reproductions made the composition familiar in France and that negotiations began for a French government purchase of the oil for the Luxembourg collection. His later account names Miss Blind, then in Paris, as the intermediary. By then, he says, the owner had already sold it in America. This is useful evidence of interest beyond Britain, though a proposed purchase is different from an acquisition. ^[3]

Delaware’s record establishes the painting’s museum home and Bancroft Memorial credit. ^[1]

Christie’s identifies Brown’s design as a stimulus for Frank Dicksee’s farewell, conceived for an illustrated Shakespeare and recast as an oil exhibited in 1884. ^[4]

The connection places Brown’s farewell within the later Victorian circulation of Shakespearean images.

Brown’s broader engagement with Shakespeare offers another way to place the picture. As Laura MacCulloch explains, his literary work grew within a culture of Shakespeare illustration shared across Britain and France. His 1844 King Lear drawings preceded this later love scene by more than twenty years. The drawings, and the paintings developed from them, make Shakespeare a sustained part of his practice rather than an isolated subject choice. ^[5]

A comparison with Lear and Cordelia and Cordelia’s Portion reveals different forms of dramatic suspension: reunion, rejection and departure. Their individual stories belong to their own scenes, but all invite attention to what bodies communicate before the next event occurs. Brown’s drawings provide the longer history of that interest. ^[5]

Painting and theatre eventually met quite literally. Alexander Thom’s study for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust reproduces the programme credit for Brown’s designs in Henry Irving’s 1892 King Lear . That later theatrical connection concerns Lear . It shows how a painter’s Shakespearean settings could move into another medium, becoming environments for actors as well as figures within a picture. ^[6]