ford madox brown - eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

undertook research to check that the scene was historically plausible. Wycliffe,
elderly and barefoot, is depicted in the centre, reading to, on the left, John of Gaunt,
his second wife Constance and their daughter Katherine, and on the right, the poets
Chaucer and Gower and two young pages. Above the scene are two roundels. One,
symbolising Catholicism, shows a young monk, clutching a crucifix and a chained
Bible: the other, symbolising Protestantism, depicts a young woman holding a Bible
open towards the viewer (cat. nos. 173 and 174). As in The Seeds and Fruits of
English Poetry, Brown used a gothic trompe l'oeil arch to separate the symbolic world
of the figures representing Protestantism and Catholicism from the more realistic
space inhabited by Wycliffe and his audience. This can be seen in an early oil sketch
(Fig. 80) of Wycliffe and in the final painting with the frame removed (Fig. 3).
The subject of Wycliffe is the most obviously Protestant of all Brown's history
paintings. Wycliffe was an English theologian who founded the Lollard movement, a
precursor to the Protestant Reformation, and the driving force behind the first
translation of the Bible into English. In Brown's painting he is portrayed as both the
foundation of English prose but also 'The Morning Star of the Reformation.' Brown's
strong combination of medieval and Protestant can be seen as acting in a similar
manner to Carlyle's Past and Present (1843), reclaiming the Gothic revival for the
largely Protestant public. 84 His two medieval history pictures are based around
characters from the fourteenth century well known by his viewers to have sown the
84 Richmond states that 'Brown's juxtaposition of styles … between the sides and central panel …
illustrates the way in which he relates the traditional past to the revolutionary present, a painterly
analogue to ideas defined by Carlyle in Past and Present' (Op. cit. at note 8. p. 371). However, she
does not link Brown's Protestant redefinition of the Gothic revival with the same task, albeit literary,
undertaken by Carlyle in Past and Present (London, 1843).
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