Style and Technique

A figure in a Ford Madox Brown painting can seem caught in the middle of an involuntary movement: Peter draws back from Christ, a labourer twists with his shovel, a child reaches towards an animal. Yet Brown’s advice to painters begins long before the model sits down. Research, imagined action, colour planning and rehearsal all help determine what the spectator will eventually see. In his 1850 essay on designing a historical picture, observation belongs within a deliberately constructed whole. ^[1]

That relationship between invention and looking runs through Brown’s art . It accommodates the theatrical energy of his literary scenes, the brightness of his outdoor pictures and the organised crowds of his public decorations. His practice changed with the subject and material. A small landscape painted on wood, an extensively revised canvas and a picture attached to a town-hall wall pose different problems; their vivid surfaces do not reveal a single recipe.

A Style That Kept Changing

Brown’s education began on the Continent, at Bruges and Ghent and subsequently under Gustaf Wappers in Antwerp. Paris brought sustained study in the Louvre. Recalling his early painting Parisina’s Sleep in 1865, Brown located its style in Spanish painting and Rembrandt, while distancing himself from both his Belgian teaching and the Paris ateliers. His later account was selective and argumentative, but it establishes that the dark early pictures emerged from choices among different traditions. ^[2]

The contrast with his mature outdoor pictures is striking. In Manfred on the Jungfrau , the red-clad protagonist advances into an open space above the snow, while the hunter reaches towards him from the side. Cloth, arms and sloping ground combine into an urgent diagonal action. Brown described the original conception as an early attempt at outdoor light, but also admitted that glaciers had not been part of his studies. He further warned that retouching in 1861 had obliterated the original colour scheme of this youthful work. The surviving painting cannot simply be read as an untouched sample of his earliest palette. ^[2]

His interest in older art also extended beyond dark tones and dramatic contrast. Writing to George Rae in January 1865 about his Italian journey, Brown recalled the wall paintings of Giotto , Masaccio and Fra Angelico among the works that had stayed most strongly in his memory. He also named Holbein, Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Titian. This retrospective list records a broad visual education; it does not identify one master as the explanation for every subsequent change. ^[2]

Compare the enclosed, costumed society of Chaucer at the Court of Edward III with the contemporary street of Work . In both, a principal activity gathers people whose bodies turn in different directions and whose attention is uneven. The modern subject brings digging, carrying and selling into the place occupied elsewhere by poetry or a historical encounter. The brighter street setting changes the visual language, while the problem of making a group readable persists.

Brown’s development is consequently easier to follow through recurring problems than through a sequence of sealed periods. Dramatic action continues into domestic subjects; concentrated observation serves imagined historical scenes; an old design can acquire a new surface. The paintings guide follows those comparisons across individual works.

Research Before the First Fixed Design

Brown’s On the Mechanism of a Historical Picture , published in The Germ in 1850, addresses the beginner preparing a first picture. He allows other artists to follow different successful methods. His own sequence starts with understanding the period and people represented, then consulting evidence for costume, architecture, furniture, vegetation and landscape. These are decisions that can change the composition itself. A garment may prevent a gesture; an authentic piece of furniture may occupy space already promised to a figure. ^[1]

The practical danger, he explains, is becoming attached to an arrangement before learning whether it can work. Research must therefore precede that attachment. It is difficult to erase an idea that has already taken possession of the mind. His historical accuracy is inseparable from the effort to make an action credible. ^[1]

With the materials assembled, the artist should imagine the picture before reaching for paper. Brown asks for prominence to be given to the important actors and for incidents requiring a verbal explanation to be rejected. A historical painting must make its central event legible through bodies and their relations. His term “pantomimic art” makes that demand unusually clear. ^[1]

He divides the conception into interdependent concerns: the story’s dramatic truth and feeling; the arrangement of figures and lines; and the disposition of colour, light and dark. Colour enters at this early stage. In a footnote he questions the practice of designing entirely in outline and postponing the colour scheme, doubting whether it can then be arranged satisfactorily. The finished brightness of a Brown painting should be considered alongside the distribution of its strongest and quietest passages. ^[1]

The white tablecloth in Jesus Washing Peter’s Feet offers a useful visual example. It stretches across the background behind the inclined figures, while dark heads collect above it. Christ’s lowered head and Peter’s hands occupy different positions within this structure. Local detail is held together by large relationships that remain apparent when the reproduction is viewed from a distance.

Acting, Drawing and the Living Model

The next stage in Brown’s essay is bodily rehearsal. With pencil and paper, the painter should sketch the figures separately while studying his own acting in a mirror, or that of a sympathetic friend. Brown thinks an unresponsive professional model can inhibit a first conception by making a possible action appear impossible. Only after the action has been discovered should the artist seek models close to the imagined characters. ^[1]

He asks the painter to work through each figure down to the fingers, the bending of a joint and the tension of a sinew, while avoiding exaggerated expression. Gesture needs both physical accuracy and a dramatic purpose. The distinction is visible in Jesus Washing Peter’s Feet : Peter’s joined hands and Christ’s hands enclosing the foot are separate kinds of contact. One gathers inward; the other reaches out to perform a task.

A later diary entry shows the mirror becoming a piece of working equipment. On 20 July 1856, while developing the lovers in Stages of Cruelty , Brown recorded designing them from himself and his daughter Lucy in a glass, with Lucy on top of the piano. This improvised arrangement made the unequal height of the figures testable in the room. It was one stage in constructing the scene, rather than evidence that the painted relationship describes the models’ lives. ^[2]

In the 1850 sequence, an oil sketch of the whole follows the determination of the actions. Studies from living models then investigate each figure nude and clothed. Brown recognises the practical awkwardness of costume: borrowed clothes may be needed briefly for a study and again months later for painting, while expensive material may be represented by only the portion visible, pinned to a lay figure. Loose drapery, however, should first be studied on a living body. ^[1]

Laura MacCulloch’s catalogue makes the different tasks tangible. The Chaucer material includes an early compositional study, separate hand studies and a black-chalk drapery study for the Black Prince, heightened with white. Her account of the Last of England cartoon identifies changes between drawing and painting, including the shawl and the surrounding passengers. A study of Emma’s head uses chalks with scratching out on two sheets. These are distinct objects made to solve different problems, rather than interchangeable examples of “preparatory drawing.” ^[6]

The final outline design in Brown’s essay establishes the figures’ sizes and places, the ground plan and architectural perspective. For a small painting, he recommends a full-size drawing that can be traced onto the canvas; for a large one, a smaller outline enlarged through squaring. Transfer carries a resolved arrangement into another material and scale. It does not remove the possibility of subsequent alteration. ^[1]

His closing advice is to continue adjusting a design while any figure, group or line could be placed better, subject to truth to nature. He calls the larger aim “constructive beauty”: a cultivated feeling for proportion which avoids both arbitrary symmetry and passive copying. The drawings guide explores the surviving works on paper in more detail. ^[1]

Organising the Light Outdoors

Outdoor observation also required construction. Brown’s retrospective diary account, resumed on 16 August 1854, describes Pretty Baa-Lambs as painted almost entirely in sunlight. Emma and Cathy modelled for the main group; a lay figure went out into the garden each morning and came indoors at night or when it rained. Sheep and lambs arrived from Clapham Common, where Brown painted the background. The apparently unified scene brought together repeated sessions and different locations. ^[3]

In the Birmingham picture, the white of the child’s clothes makes the folds conspicuous, while the patterned blue dress holds smaller variations of light. The sheep’s fleece offers another pale surface, broken into short textures. Grass, human skin, fabric and wool register the same illumination through different shapes. The low boundary of the distant landscape leaves the standing pair exposed against a broad sky.

For The Last of England , Brown sought a quite different effect. His 1865 explanation describes the appearance of objects surrounded by light on a dull day at sea. He worked largely outdoors in overcast conditions and painted the flesh on cold days. In his diary for 2 September 1855, he welcomed weather that made his own hand look blue, because that was what the picture required. A particular colour depended on the physical situation of the model. ^{[2] [3]}

These sessions did not reproduce the shipboard scene in front of him. They supplied observations for an invented arrangement. The bowed heads, umbrella, bonnet ribbons and linked hands give the couple a compact structure within the oval. Observation provided the character of the light; design organised the pressures of the departure.

Brown’s account of The Hayfield is equally specific. Rain had delayed the second hay crop at Hendon, intensifying the contrast between green grass and brown hay. In twilight the hay appeared positively red or pink. The colour belongs to a relationship among neighbouring surfaces under changing illumination. ^[2]

The small scale of some landscapes is part of their physical character. Tate’s historical collection records describe The Hayfield , dated 1855–1856, and Carrying Corn , dated 1854–1855, as oil paintings on mahogany. Carrying Corn measures only 197 × 276 mm. ^[7] Its expanse of blue sky makes the distant yellow stacks and deeply green foreground feel emphatic even within that modest support. The working figure is low in the vegetation; landscape takes most of the picture’s space.

An outdoor subject could also be painted from indoors. In the retrospective diary, Brown describes beginning An English Autumn Afternoon from a bedroom in Hampstead, interrupting it when the room was needed, and returning to the view the following autumn. Access to a window and the recurrence of the season shaped its making. ^[3]

He also distinguished the light falling on his painting from the light represented in it. On 23 June 1856, working on the garden subject that became Stages of Cruelty , he erected a tent to shade the working surface. Without that protection, he found the colours seemed bright outdoors but looked flat and colourless when taken inside. On 9 July he scraped painted leaves with a razor, adjusted them indoors and went outside again. Observation included checking the picture under the conditions in which it would be seen. ^[2]

Materials and Revision: The Evidence of Particular Pictures

Brown’s diary gives unusually direct evidence for some materials, together with his changing opinion of them. In the 1854 retrospective account he names Roberson’s undrying copal in connection with Pretty Baa-Lambs . Discussing the first painting of Jesus Washing Peter’s Feet , he says the flesh was painted on wet white at Millais’s instigation and immediately expresses distrust of both the advice and the medium. This is testimony about named paintings, written in an irritated retrospective voice. It establishes neither a universal Brown method nor a modern conservation verdict. ^[3]

His record of revising Jesus Washing Peter’s Feet is more dramatic. On 30 June 1856, calculating the time before the Liverpool Academy exhibition, he decided he could clothe Christ. He thought the painted legs good enough to preserve, so cut them out of the picture, which was already lined, glued in another piece of canvas and filled it. Subsequent entries describe improving Peter’s green mantle. Revision involved the support and the colour relationships, as well as the represented costume. ^[2]

The diary does not tell us everything about the surviving joins or layers. It does tell us why it is unsafe to imagine the present picture as a single continuous execution. The kneeling Christ now has a strongly articulated clothed body: folds gather around his legs and spread towards the lower edge. That coherent appearance contains a history of substantial reconstruction.

Take your Son, Sir presents another kind of alteration. On 16 March 1857 Brown recorded drawing his infant son Arthur, then painting him onto an enlarged canvas already bearing a study of Emma’s head. He had sent it away to be enlarged a second time after making an error. The passage describes the growth of a composition from existing painted material. It does not explain the eventual unfinished state or warrant a confident account of the woman’s fictional circumstances. ^[2]

The visible contrast is extraordinary: the mother’s face, the baby and the circular mirror are worked out, while much of the lower dress remains a pale field crossed by drawn lines. Different degrees of completion occupy the same surface. An unfinished picture makes decisions visible that a fully painted surface usually conceals.

Even in the account of Work , Hueffer distinguishes the long process of collecting observations from the appearance of effortless coherence. He describes pits sought or dug for models and mortar repeatedly turned to obtain the right marks on a spade. These are the biographer’s descriptions of Brown’s working habits. Together with Brown’s own diary, they reveal a practice in which both finding a motif and rebuilding its circumstances could demand prolonged labour. ^[2]

Frames as Part of the Picture

A picture’s material boundary could demand further invention. Lynn Roberts’s specialist study reproduces Brown’s letters to James Leathart about frames. On 16 January 1863 he described combining his design for Lear and Cordelia with “Rossetti’s thumb-mark pattern”; on 8 February he considered registering their best patterns. A letter of 12 July 1864 about Oure Ladye of Good Children records adjusting the gilding, adding lettering and filling twenty-two circles with angel outlines. These letters reach us through Roberts’s article. They show shared patterns and workshop labour continuing beyond the painted rectangle. ^[8]

The National Portrait Gallery’s catalogue offers a separate example. On 2 July 1872 Brown asked Sir Charles Dilke to let him order the frame for the Fawcett double portrait, proposing a Venetian pattern from Green’s business. Jacob Simon’s frame entry identifies the surviving gilt-pine frame with composition mouldings as apparently standard Watts construction, and regards it as presumably the pattern Brown meant. The letter documents Brown’s choice; the precise identification remains the specialist’s qualified conclusion. ^[9]

Frames could also carry language. Tim Barringer’s account of Work draws attention to the scriptural inscriptions on its frame and reads the painting in relation to Christian service and Jesus Washing Peter’s Feet . The border supplies a religious context for the modern street. This is Barringer’s interpretation of the relation between picture and inscription, rather than a complete explanation of every figure. ^[10]

Designing for Glass and Walls

Work in other materials redistributed authorship. For King René’s Honeymoon Cabinet , the V&A identifies J. P. Seddon as the furniture designer and his father’s firm as the cabinet-maker. Brown suggested the theme and painted Architecture among panels supplied by several artists; Morris designed their decorative backgrounds. The related stained-glass Architecture panel adapted the subject for a library window at Myles Birket Foster’s house. Painted furniture and a window are separate objects, even where they share an invention. ^[11]

The transition makes the division between conception and execution particularly important. A designer’s drawn figure can become part of a collectively made object whose proportions and material boundaries are already determined. The stained-glass and decorative arts guide follows those collaborations and adaptations.

In his 1893 essay Of Mural Painting , Brown approached the wall as a distinct problem. He wanted the decoration to preserve the building’s solidity, “its not appearing to be a hole in the wall.” Landscape distance could conflict with that requirement. He also rejected very dark subjects for murals. These statements describe his preferences for architectural painting, although distance and darkness could serve him effectively elsewhere. ^[4]

The Manchester cycle comprises twelve paintings, begun in 1879 and completed in 1893. Manchester City Council distinguishes seven painted directly on the walls using the Gambier-Parry spirit-fresco process from the last five, painted on canvas after Brown returned to London. They are not twelve examples of traditional Italian fresco. ^[5]

Brown’s essay confirms his use of spirit fresco for seven Manchester works, then discusses canvas subsequently cemented to a wall. He gives alternative preparations and painting media, describes obtaining a matt surface, and values the possibility of detaching the canvas if damp causes trouble. This discussion belongs to mural construction: it is not a formula to transfer to his earlier easel paintings. His predictions of durability also remain an artist’s contemporary assessment. ^[4]

The public mattered as much as the support. Brown insisted that the artist should control the invention, while arguing that pictures paid for by the public should offer subjects people could understand and care about. His late architectural practice returns to the concern running through the 1850 essay: technical accomplishment must carry an intelligible human action. ^[4]