Ford Madox Brown : The Manchester Murals and the Matter of History

This book argues that Ford Madox Brown’s murals in the Great Hall, Manchester Town Hall (1878–93), were the most important public artworks 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 book explains the thinking behind the programme and indicates how each mural contributes to a radical vision of social and cultural life. It documents how Brown’s pictorial innovations relate to Thomas Carlyle’s model of history and it indicates how the Manchester murals questioned the verities of British liberalism. 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. Front Matter 1 Dedication 6 Contents 8 List of plates 9 List of figures 11 Acknowledgements 13 Abbreviations 15 Introduction 16 Part I: A working life 44 Ford Madox Brown and the historical imagination 46 The making of Ford Madox Brown 89 Part II: History embodied 140 Manchester, mythos, murals 142 The endless periphery 176 Manchester made modern 201 Afterword: the last of Ford Madox Brown 230 Select bibliography 239 Index 251 Plates 259 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. -- .