ford madox brown - eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

and perfect their poses. He has also begun to give them individual characters,
including facial features and costumes. As the quotation from his essay reveals
Brown saw himself as both playwright and director, constructing a narrative scene of
individual personalities and moving them around until they play out the story he
wants to impart. If he could create a convincing drama, full of believable characters
in accurate poses he could persuade his modern viewers to step back in time.
After sketching the whole composition and finding the right pose and character for
each 'actor' Brown began to make more detailed drawings of the scene as shown in the
two early compositional studies for Chaucer at BMAG (cat. nos. 15 and 16). Here he
used much bolder lines to draw the figures, having worked through each character in
his mind. Many of the figures from these two drawings made it into the final
painting, although as the discrepancies between the two drawings highlight, even at
this point, some characters were cut, or changed, as the picture took shape.
Surprisingly, Brown still seemed to be having trouble placing the important figure of
John of Gaunt, Chaucer's patron. He wanted to emphasise Gaunt's role in aiding the
father of English poetry by showing them close together, side by side at the lectern. 179
However, he must have felt this position would upstage Chaucer as in the final
painting he placed Gaunt on the right, behind Edward III and Alice Perrers, the king's
mistress. By this stage each figure had already been given an individual costume
following Brown's careful research. It was also at this stage that Brown would begin
to use costumes on models or lay figures.
179 The figure of John of Gaunt troubled Brown for some time. In each progressive version of Chaucer
he appears in a different position getting further and further away from Chaucer. In Fig. 1 Gaunt now
stands on the right but is still next to Chaucer, in Fig. 77 Gaunt sits between Chaucer and Alice Perrers,
and in the final painting (Fig. 2) he stands on the far right, but their hands are almost touching.
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