Ford Madox Brown and History Painting

Abstract

This article argues that Ford Madox Brown’s modern-life painting should be seen as a subset of his practice in history painting. Whether he chose subject-matter from the contemporary world or from the past, Brown sought to give it the weight and ethical seriousness traditionally associated with history painting. This ambition helps to make sense of Brown’s practice in religious painting, an area neglected in the previous secondary literature, but which this article argues was of crucial importance to Brown’s artistic project. His distinctive innovation was to replace the generalized timescale of traditional history painting with multiple temporalities: timed history, the timeless, and the modern perspective.

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