ford madox brown - eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

Byron, Pope and Burns, and in medallions Goldsmith and Thomson. Other poets
(Campbell, Moore, Shelley, Keats, Chatterton, Kirke White, Coleridge, and
Wordsworth) were named on the plaques held by putti below. 67 Brown included a
number of Scottish poets, Burns, Campbell and Thomson, and the Irish poet Thomas
Moore in his 'love offering' to his favourite 'English' poets. 68 As Mitchell explains
this was not unusual in the nineteenth century when the 'nationalist literature of
Scotland, Wales and Ireland was 'politically neutralized.' 69
Brown set the figures within a trompe l'oeil gothic architecture, similar to the
architecture of the new houses of Parliament and reminiscent of the Italian medieval
altarpieces that he must have seen when he visited Italy in 1845. In the words of Lucy
Rabin ‘the triptych Seeds and Fruits gives the sense of two separate, but visually
unequal worlds, the one symbolical, the other real: the former, with its gold patterned
ground, merely provides the setting for the latter, which is a re-creation of a real event
in the process of happening.’ 70 Although Brown could not be sure that this particular
event did occur he undertook research in the British Museum and the National
Gallery, discussed below, to confirm that historically it could have taken place. The
wings were later discarded and the central panel became Geoffrey Chaucer reading
the "Legend of Custance" to Edward III and his Court, at the Palace of Sheen, on the
Anniversary of the Black Prince's forty-fifth Birthday [hereafter referred to as
Chaucer] (Fig. 2).
67 Op. cit. at note 51, p. 99-100. Rabin incorrectly identifies Henry Kirke White (1785-1806) as Dirke
White. See catalogue p. 205 for birth and death dates of the poets.
68 Op. cit. at note 66, p. 2.
69 Op. cit. at note 14, p. 9.
70 Op. cit. at note 51, p. 101.
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