ford madox brown - eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

East and perceived contemporary customs and dress as exactly the same as those in
the past. 91 Interestingly, Brown himself takes a very different view. In his entry for
The Death of Eglon he stated:
To pretend that the Semetic races to which the Israelites belong, have not
changed in costume and character of appearance up to the present day, is
against the evidence of our eyes, as may be readily seen by the Assyrian
remains and those of their neighbours, the Egyptians, which we have in
the British Museum to compare with the modern Arab. 92
The notion of the unchanging East is one he feels the French created and he
patriotically warns other 'Englishmen' that they 'should always remember that this
convenient resemblance between the Israelite of old, and the Arab of our days, came
into vogue in France rather suspiciously, at the time of the French conquest of
Algiers, under Louis Philip.' 93 However, this did not stop Brown from using a
contemporary Palestinian landscape as the background in Joseph's Coat.
As has been seen Brown approached his illustrations with the same artistic integrity as
his paintings. The vast amount of time he spent on them and the research he
undertook highlight the difference between his approach and that of notable
illustrators such as John Gilbert who produced work extremely rapidly and
91
See Edward W. Said, Orientalism, London, 1995 (first published in 1978) for his argument that the
West does not acknowledge the changing nature of Eastern cultures. However, Said does not discuss
art in any depth. In Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts, John M. MacKenzie looks at
Orientalism in the arts, particularly the nineteenth century but does not discuss book illustration
(Manchester and New York, 1995).
92
Op. cit. at note 83, p. 21.
93
Ibid., p. 21.
172