ford madox brown - eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

engraving of 'Cimabue' but does not individually identify any other figures used by
Brown. New research on these three sheets of drawings has enabled this thesis to
build on Smith's earlier work by naming each of the illustrations traced by Brown
(Figs. 91-98). In addition, Smith illustrates cat. no. 59 giving it the title 'Tracings
from the Costume Historique.' It is now apparent that not all the drawings on this
sheet were copied from Costume Historique. One of the figures in cat. no. 59 was not
copied from Bonnard. The head which Brown inscribed 'Hood & Lirilipipe of a count
of Flanders' was in fact copied by him from another source book: J. R. Planché's
History of British Costume (Fig. 99). 131 Planché includes the portrait as an illustration
in his book giving it the title 'Charles le Bon, Count of Flanders' and on the same page
explains to his readers that during Edward III's reign the fashion was for 'short hoods
and liripipes (the long tails or tippets of the hoods).' 132 This illustration became the
blue-print for a hood Brown made up. On 25 September 1847 he wrote in his diary
'fumbled till 12 o'clock over the Hood of the left hand corner figure of the "knight"
made a lirlipipe [sic] for it.' A black chalk drawing dated 1847 in the Birmingham
collection reveals that he later arranged the hood on a lay figure and drew a study
from it for the man fourth up on the left hand side of Chaucer (cat. no. 26). This
figure appears in this hood in one of the early compositional studies at BMAG (cat.
no. 16), in the Cecil Higgins chalk study for The Seeds and Fruits (Fig. 77), and in the
Ashmolean oil study (Fig. 1). It is also in the final painting although in a slightly
different pose, leaning further forward (Fig. 2). It appears that Brown also used the
illustration for the figure in the white hood sitting in the front row on the left in
Chaucer. Brown may have also borrowed other details from Costume Historique
131 Planché's book was published several times under different titles although it was originally
published in 1834 as British Costume: A complete History of the Dress of the Inhabitants of the British
Isles.
132 Op. cit. at note 21, p. 134.
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