1821 - 1893 • English • Painter • Realist
"This picture is in the strictest sense historical. It treats of the great emigration movement which attained its culminating point in 1852. The educated are bound to their country by quite other ties than the illiterate man, whose chief consideration is food and physical comfort. I have, therefore, in order to present the parting scene in its fullest tragic development, singled out a couple from the middle class." - Ford Madox Brown
The picture Brown describes, The Last of England (1852-55), is his masterpiece. It has the circular format of a TONDO, and the subject-a married couple with a baby-alludes to the Holy Family theme. But this is a political subject, not a biblical one, as Brown's commentary above explains. It concerns the economic necessity of leaving the homeland. Brown's wife modeled for the woman, he for the man; the child is all but hidden under the mother's cloak. They are on a departing boat; the husband holds an umbrella to shield his wife from the ocean spray. Behind them is "an honest family of the green-grocer kind," behind them a "reprobate" shaking his fist at the country he must abandon. Brown himself was in dire financial straits at the time he painted the picture, and was planning to leave for India, which he probably would have done had the painting not sold. (Despite Brown's comment, the rate of emigration greatly increased over the next decades.) Brown had traveled and studied widely before settling in London in 1844. Important influences on his style were works of HOLBEIN, which he saw in Basel, and the NAZARENES, whose work he saw in Rome. In 1848 ROSSETTI began to study with him, and they formed an enduring friendship. In Brown's largest, most complex and ambitious painting, Chaucer (1851), Rossetti was his model for Chaucer and various members of the PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD modeled for other characters. Brown was never a member of the Brotherhood, though he sympathized with their ideas, acted as adviser, and adapted some of their subjects and techniques. One of those techniques was a meticulous finish, MILLAIS's "wet white" method of layering transparent colors bit by bit on a wet white GROUND. Brown also painted landscapes, which he did out-of-doors, looking at nature as RUSKIN and the Brotherhood urged.
