ford madox brown - eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

CHAPTER 3
FORGOTTEN IMAGES:
THE ILLUSTRATIONS OF FORD MADOX BROWN
The Birmingham collection is rich in objects relating to Ford Madox Brown’s work as
an illustrator. These include early compositional sketches, original wood blocks and
many of the final printed images. Despite such rich holdings Brown is better known
for his work as a painter and relatively little has been written on his accomplishments
as an illustrator. Scholars have tended to emphasize the minimal number of
illustrations he produced and have overlooked the artistic significance of this area of
his work which he pursued throughout his career. In John Everett Millais: Illustrator
and Narrator, Paul Goldman states that Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) 'produced
just ten and [Brown] fewer than 20 images in total, and both artists abandoned
illustration early in their careers.' 1 Though Rossetti gave up illustrating early on, as
will be seen, Brown actually continued to design illustrations until a year before his
death. He began producing graphic art at an important artistic juncture in the century
when the rise of Pre-Raphaelitism met with the explosion of wood engraving. Yet
although Brown is included in numerous studies of Pre-Raphaelite illustrations and
graphic art in the 1860s his work elicits far less discussion than that of his
contemporaries. 2 Two academic works have more recently highlighted, but not
1 Paul Goldman, John Everett Millias: Illustrator and Narrator, exh. cat., BMAG, 2004, p. 8.
2 The main surveys of Pre-Raphaelite illustration which cover Brown are: Gleeson White, English
Illustration ‘The Sixties 1855-70,’ London, 1897; Forrest Reid, Illustrators of the Sixties, London,
1928; Eric de Maré, The Victorian Woodblock Illustrators, London, 1980; Paul Goldman, Victorian
Illustrated Books 1850-1870: The Heyday of Wood-engraving, London, 1994; Paul Goldman, Victorian
Illustration: The Pre-Raphaelites, the Idyllic School and the High Victorians, Aldershot, 1996 and
2004. Due to the broad nature of these surveys they do not discuss Brown's career as an illustrator in
depth.
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