ford madox brown - eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

uried at last; and hope that British artists will leave off finding his body anymore,
which they have been doing, in every exhibition, for these fifty years.' 51
Brown sets the scene of this momentous occasion on the battlefield, allowing him to
approach it from the standpoint of the picturesque mode of history by including a
large number of figures from different levels of society. Surrounding the central
characters of William and Harold are lords on horseback; lowly foot soldiers, two of
whom on the left have continued to fight to the death, one sinking his teeth into the
other's neck; a stable boy and a monk. Not only did this allow him to include figures
from various classes but it also gave him the opportunity show his knowledge of the
different costumes appropriate for each level of society.
This is the approach he appears to have taken to an incomplete composition based
around another Anglo-Saxon monarch. There are several pencil sketches at BMAG of
Alfred the Great surrounded by a crowd of figures (cat. nos. 1, 82 and 83). It is
difficult to tell from these very loose sketches exactly what King Alfred is doing. One
possibility is that he is drawing a plan of attack against the Danes in the sand as he
was well-known for having warded off a Danish offensive by spying on the enemy.
However, it is also possible that this scene may depict Alfred dividing up time. Even
at this early stage of a composition Brown shows Alfred drawing a clock-face-like
diagram in the sand. This idea may have come to him from Mackintosh's History of
England in which the author noted that Alfred 'devised means of measuring time in
51 Punch, no. 13, 1847, pp. 8-9 (cited T. S. R. Boase, ‘The Decoration of the New Palace of
Westminster, 1841-1863,’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XVII, 1954, p. 343). Lucy
Rabin suggests that Brown made Harold the focus of the picture when William was more widely
glorified and that this reversal was ‘perhaps an assertion of Brown’s sense of his own native ancestry’
(Ford Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelite History-Picture, New York and London, 1978, p. 70).
Considering the number of entries for the competitions depicting Harold rather than William this
observation seems misguided.
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