Brown Ford Madox

Brown, Ford Madox, painter, grandson of Dr. John Brown (q.v.), was born in 1821, at Calais. He studied at Antwerp under Baron Wappers. In 1844 he sent two cartoons to the Westminster Hall exhibition, preliminary to the mural decorations of the Houses of Parliament, and in the following year he again contributed; but though his works won the encomiums of Haydon, they yet gained no prize. His Chaucer reciting his Poetry at the Court of Edward III. was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1851, won the Liverpool prize of £50, and was shown at the Paris Exhibition of 1855. After other similar successes he held an exhibition in 1865 of his works in London. In his later life he was engaged in Manchester, decorating the town hall with a series of designs illustrative of the history of the city. Among his most characteristic works are Cordelia and Lear, Christ washing Peter's Feet, Work, The Last of England, Romeo and Juliet, The Entombment, and Cromwell. He is ranked generally among the pre-Raphaelites, and regarded as the master of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He died in 1893. His son, Oliver Madox Brown, a painter, poet, and novelist of extraordinary promise, died in 1874, at the age of 19. Gabriel Denver and The Divale Bluth are his best known works of fiction.