Disgruntled, with almost poutingly contorted lips, the British painter Ford Madox Brown looks at us from one of his most famous paintings. For "The Last of England"(1852-55) not only he himself was a model, but also his second wife Emma and his little daughter Catherine Emily. While the blonde girl mischievously peeps out behind a woman's back and bites into an apple, the wife looks wistfully into the distance. The boat she is sitting in is rocking on the waves, it is raining and it is cold. The white rocks of Dover slowly disappear in the distance.
To be able to show exactly this facial expression, Madox Brown let his family sit outside in bad weather. This way he was able to reproduce the painful face of his wife very realistically. And even the painter himself seems to have lost sight of the cheerfulness in English rainy weather. This striving for an almost extremely lifelike and realistic representation was something the painter had in common with the pre-Raphaelite artists who caused a furore in England in the middle of the 19th century. This group of artists, whose driving force was the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, also wanted to remain faithful to nature in their works, to paint it in all its details. Ford Madox Ford showed this interest for a realistic and lifelike representation early on. Already in the 1840s he studied corpses at University College London in order to get to know the human body and finally to be able to paint it as it really was. Because of his realistic painting style, he is therefore compared with the German painter Adolph Menzel, who is regarded as the formative artist of realism in the 19th century. Ford Madox Brown created paintings with historical subjects, but also immortalized themes of his time on canvas. As he himself was very socially committed, some of his works also deal with contemporary social problems and concerns.
Ford Madox Brown and Dante Gabriel Rossetti were close friends for many years. His eldest daughter Emma Lucy, from his first marriage, even lived with the Rossetti family for a while and eventually married Dante's brother. Artistically, however, Ford Madox Brown and Dante Gabriel Rossetti were not always in agreement. In 1848 Rossetti was Ford Madox Brown's pupil for a short time and took painting lessons from him. In the end, however, the free-spirited Rossetti could not make friends with the old academic teaching methods that Madox Brown advocated. As head of the Pre-Raphaelites, Rossetti rejected precisely this academic painting. This was perhaps one reason for Ford Madox Brown not to join this group of artists. He wanted to remain independent, not be tied to a manifesto, and paint what he wanted and how he wanted. But Madox Brown took over the use of vibrant, bright colors from the Pre-Raphaelites.
Disgruntled, with almost poutingly contorted lips, the British painter Ford Madox Brown looks at us from one of his most famous paintings. For "The Last of England"(1852-55) not only he himself was a model, but also his second wife Emma and his little daughter Catherine Emily. While the blonde girl mischievously peeps out behind a woman's back and bites into an apple, the wife looks wistfully into the distance. The boat she is sitting in is rocking on the waves, it is raining and it is cold. The white rocks of Dover slowly disappear in the distance.
To be able to show exactly this facial expression, Madox Brown let his family sit outside in bad weather. This way he was able to reproduce the painful face of his wife very realistically. And even the painter himself seems to have lost sight of the cheerfulness in English rainy weather. This striving for an almost extremely lifelike and realistic representation was something the painter had in common with the pre-Raphaelite artists who caused a furore in England in the middle of the 19th century. This group of artists, whose driving force was the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, also wanted to remain faithful to nature in their works, to paint it in all its details. Ford Madox Ford showed this interest for a realistic and lifelike representation early on. Already in the 1840s he studied corpses at University College London in order to get to know the human body and finally to be able to paint it as it really was. Because of his realistic painting style, he is therefore compared with the German painter Adolph Menzel, who is regarded as the formative artist of realism in the 19th century. Ford Madox Brown created paintings with historical subjects, but also immortalized themes of his time on canvas. As he himself was very socially committed, some of his works also deal with contemporary social problems and concerns.
Ford Madox Brown and Dante Gabriel Rossetti were close friends for many years. His eldest daughter Emma Lucy, from his first marriage, even lived with the Rossetti family for a while and eventually married Dante's brother. Artistically, however, Ford Madox Brown and Dante Gabriel Rossetti were not always in agreement. In 1848 Rossetti was Ford Madox Brown's pupil for a short time and took painting lessons from him. In the end, however, the free-spirited Rossetti could not make friends with the old academic teaching methods that Madox Brown advocated. As head of the Pre-Raphaelites, Rossetti rejected precisely this academic painting. This was perhaps one reason for Ford Madox Brown not to join this group of artists. He wanted to remain independent, not be tied to a manifesto, and paint what he wanted and how he wanted. But Madox Brown took over the use of vibrant, bright colors from the Pre-Raphaelites.
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