Ford Madox Brown

This original book explores the thinking behind Brown’s murals in Manchester Town Hall. It argues that Brown was the most innovative artist in Victorian Britain and that he used this public commission to contest the liberal model of British history favoured by the Manchester Corporation. This first book-length study of Ford Madox Brown’s Manchester murals (1878–93) reassesses the critical significance of the most important public art project in late nineteenth-century Britain. Examining each of the twelve murals in detail, it demonstrates how they responded to political disputes about the nature of history, culture and social life.The first part of the book challenges existing readings of Brown by illustrating how his ideas about art relate to Thomas Carlyle’s unusual modelling of history. It goes on to explain why Brown wanted to imagine a new type of painting operating at the intersection of Hogarthian populism and socially engaged romanticism. The second part traces the ramifications of this way of thinking about art practice by presenting a detailed reading of the conception, production and critical reception of the Manchester mural programme. Throughout, the book advances a larger argument about the nature of Brown’s cultural and political interests. Rather than simply reproducing liberalism in artistic form, Brown designed the mural programme to address contemporary questions: what is the nature of historical life? How do we distinguish between cultural value and economic value? How do we share human experience? For readers with an interest in the history of Victorian culture and intellectual history, Ford Madox Brown, the Manchester murals and the matter of history is packed with rewarding observations and analyses. This book argues that Ford Madox Brown’s murals in the Great Hall of Manchester Town Hall (1878–93) were the most important public art works of their day. Brown’s twelve designs on the history of Manchester, remarkable exercises in the making of historical vision, were semi-forgotten by academics until the 1980s, partly because of Brown’s unusually muscular conception of what history painting should set out to achieve. This ground-breaking book explains the thinking behind the programme and indicates how each mural contributes to a radical vision of social and cultural life. It shows the important link between Brown and Thomas Carlyle, the most iconoclastic of Victorian intellectuals, and reveals how Brown set about questioning the verities of British liberalism.