ford madox brown - eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

chiaroscuro. 163 Brown seems to have believed in the benefits of this type of exercise
as one of the tasks he set his first student, Rossetti, who wanted lessons in oil
painting, was to paint a collection of bottles and ornaments. 164 Having proved
himself able Brown would have progressed to drawing from plaster casts of classical
sculptures, and then from life figures before attempting oil painting. According to
Julian Treuherz the English training system 'encouraged miniaturistic skills and fine
detail, but at the expense of breadth and large-scale design,' as found in paintings by
frequent RA exhibitors Edward Matthew Ward (1816-1879) and W. P. Frith. 165
These were skills that Brown was able to acquire from his final master Baron Gustaf
Wappers. The Belgium based artist produced vast historical scenes on which the
students were required to work as part of their training, giving them the chance to
bring together the skills they had learnt and gain a greater understanding of how to
design and execute large paintings. It may have been Brown's belief that a continental
training was more thorough, which compelled him to write an essay on the design of a
historical painting for his contemporaries who had trained in England. 166
Having chosen a 'fit subject,' as discussed above, Brown became ‘acquainted with the
character, habits, and appearance, of the people which he [was] about to represent'
through historical research using 'the proper authorities.' 167 In his essay for The Germ
he warned that
163
Julian Treuherz, Victorian Painting, 1993, p. 41. Frith trained at the Sass's Drawing Academy and
the Royal Academy Schools in London.
164
This was not at all how Rossetti wanted to learn and after this exercise he stopped receiving lessons
from Brown, although the two continued a life-long friendship. Another of Brown's first tasks for
Rossetti was to copy his painting Angels watching the Crown of Thorns: Study of clasped Hands (c.
1846) an exercise Brown must have learnt during his own training. See cat. no. 2.
165
Op. cit. at note 163, p. 41.
166
According to Rathbone, his last student, the advice Brown gave him as a pupil in the 1880s was
'precisely that contained in his early article' in The Germ (Op. cit. at note 88, Appendix A, p. 429).
This suggests that Brown altered his working process very little during his career.
167
Op. cit. at note 2, p. 70.
128