“Farewell to England” (1852–1855) - painting by English artist Ford Madox Brown .
Ford Madox Brown | ||
Farewell to England . 1855 | ||
The last of england | ||
wood, oil. 82.5 × 75 cm | ||
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery , Birmingham | ||
( Inventory ) | ||
Content
Creation History
Madox Brown began work on the painting in 1852, in connection with the departure of his close friend, the pre-Raphaelite sculptor, Thomas Wulner, to Australia in July of the same year. In the 1850s, about 350,000 people emigrated from England annually. Brown, who at that time was experiencing serious material difficulties, thought about moving to India with his wife and children. He defined his position as “very difficult and a little crazy”.
Story
The picture shows a married couple (the artist himself and his second wife Emma), holding hands, turned away from the English shore (in the background are the White Rocks of Dover ). In the background are the passengers of the ship. A girl with an apple in her hand is the daughter of the artist Katherine. A woman squeezes the handle of another child (Brown's son, Oliver), covered with her mantilla. Household detail - vegetables hung on handrails - indicates that travelers have a long way to go. Clothing spouses indicates that the family belongs to the middle class, and they leave the country not for the reasons that cause the emigration of the working classes; in the 1865 exhibition catalog, Brown develops this theme: "Educated people are in fact connected with their country by other connections than an illiterate person, whose main consideration is food and physical comfort" [2] .
Formally, Brown was not a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but Farewell to England, like many of his other paintings, demonstrates his commitment to the doctrines of the movement. Striving for the greatest likelihood, the artist wrote outdoors in the garden of his home in Hampstead , mostly on cloudy days. He also painted his wife in the open air, working even when the snow fell. As always, he wrote slowly, carefully working through the details, in his diary Brown noted that it took four weeks to draw fluttering hat tapes [3] .
In the pencil drawing to the “Farewell to England”, made in 1852, the inscription on the lifeboat White Horse Lin [e] of Australi [a] is noticeable - a hint of Wolner's departure to Australia. In the final version on board the boat, from which the young man unloads vegetables, you can see the name of the ship "Eldorado", an ironic reference to the name of the mythical country .
Composition
For the picture, Brown chose an unusual shape - a tondo , typical of the painting of the Italian Renaissance . It took a special skill to fit into it a multi-figure composition. Thanks to this format, the viewer's eye focuses on the two main characters of the picture, their strained faces, and only then switches to the other passengers (the family of “an honest greengrocer” and “scum”, threatening with her fist with the curses on the land of his birth, as if she were responsible for his failures " [2] .
Versions of the painting
There are two versions of the painting, one is kept in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, the second is in the Fitzwillam Museum ( Cambridge ). An exact watercolor copy of the Birmingham version, created between 1864–1866, is in the Tate Britain gallery. Watercolor was intended for George Ray Birkenhead, the patron saint of the Pre-Raphaelites. According to some reports, part of the work was performed by Brown’s daughter Katherine. There is also a detailed pencil sketch of the whole picture. All options are in the form of a tondo, but differ in color.
The picture was exhibited in 1855 and was a success, it was immediately bought, and the artist at the time decided his own material problems and left thoughts of emigration.
In March 1859, “The Last Sight of England” (as the picture was then called) was sold by Benjamin Vindos to Ernest Gambar for 325 guineas [4] (which was 25,800 pounds in 2010 prices).
Notes
- ↑ 1 2 http://www.preraphaelites.org/the-collection/1891p24/the-last-of-england/
- ↑ 1 2 Catalog of Mr Brown's Exhibition, 191 Piccadilly, 1865, cited by: Lambourne 1999, p.356
- ↑ Tim Barringer, 'Brown, Ford Madox (1821–1893)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept. 2004
- ↑ Sale Of Valuable Pictures // The Times . - 28 Mar 1859.
Literature
- Laurence de Car. Pre-Raphaelites: Modernism in English / Trans. Y. Eidelkind. - M: AST, 2002. - p. 46. - ISBN 5-17-008099-9 .
- World art. Pre-Raphaelism / Comp. IG Mosin. - SZKEO Kristall LLC, 2006. - p. 36.
- Lionel lambourne Victorian Painting. - London, 1999. - p. 355-9.