ford madox brown - eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

As shown above the strongest evidence to support Brown's knowledge of Fuseli and
his contemporaries is found by looking at his drawings. However, Brown’s
biographer, his grandson, Hueffer does mention an interest in Prometheus when
discussing Brown’s painting Manfred at the Chamois Hut, 1840. Hueffer remarks
that ‘at this point he would seem, for some reason, to have dropped his Promethean
ideas, perhaps owing to the coldness with which Casey and his other student friends
received them. It was then that he set to work diligently to copy the Rembrandts at
the Louvre.’ 102 This is the only time Hueffer refers to a Promethean tendency and he
implies that Brown lost interest in the work of the Romantic artists working in
England in the late eighteenth century as early as 1840. However, as has been shown
above, similarities between their works and Brown’s drawings for the Ascension, his
illustrations for King Lear and his works depicting captive men show that his
enthusiasm did not wane as early as this. Interest in the Prometheus legend was
sustained into the nineteenth century by the publication of Byron's poem Prometheus
in 1816 and Shelley's play Prometheus Unbound in 1820. In the 1840s artistic
interest in this theme continued: in 1843 Joseph Noel Paton won second place in the
Art Union of London outline drawing competition with a series of designs illustrating
Shelley's Prometheus Unbound which were published the following year. 103 In 1845
G. Wood exhibited The Binding of Prometheus at the RA. 104 It appears that this
interest had also spread to the young artists who were part of the English expatriot
community in Paris.
102 Op. cit. at note 1, p. 29.
103 Of the 30 entries to the competition two were for designs on the theme of Prometheus (Minutes of
the Committee Meeting of The Art Union of London, 2 April 1843, British Library, vol. 3, Add.
38867). Prometheus Unbound with illustrations by Joseph Noel Paton was published in London by
Holloway in 1844. The Art Union praised Paton's work saying: 'This is a work of genius-genius of the
best and rarest order' (vol. 6, no. 66, 1 June, 1844, p. 151).
104 No. 177 (Op. cit. at note 26, 1845, p. 11).
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