Illustration: Ford Madox Brown. The Death of Tristram, 1862.
Of the artists, including Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rosetti, who contributed cartoons towards the set of stained glass windows for Harden Grange in Yorkshire, it is perhaps Ford Madox Brown that produced the most dynamic and emotionally successful composition.
All thirteen stained glass windows were set within the theme of the story of Tristram and Isoude. They were completed in 1862 with Ford Madox Brown contributing just one scene as compared to five by Edward Burne-Jones, though to be fair Rossetti only contributed two and Burne-Jones contribution seems out of proportion to the other artists.
Brown produced a scene that entailed the death of Tristram by King Mark. In the scene above, King Mark has just violently and treacherously butchered Tristram, while Isoude mourns the death of her lover. It is a powerful scene made the more so by the stance of King Mark who seems to fill at least half of the composition, Tristram and Isoude being squeezed into the lower section, as if their role in the story line was fading away.
Brown often created a near graphic quality to his work with details both small and large being equally emphasised. These details very often picked out vignettes in a larger scene, and very often they were full of both social commentary and social criticism of the contemporary world he lived in.
Although to some extent the artist has been added to the Pre-Raphaelite group, he was never a whole-hearted member, in either temperament or subject matter. Although being close to Rossetti and later involved in William Morris first venture into the business world with Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co, there always seemed much more to Brown than drooping damsels and narrative scenes from Dante. Probably his two most important works, Work and The Last of England have no literary or romantic theme and were considered by many, when first displayed to the public, to be too real for polite consumption. Work in particular made relatively stark comments about social segregation and the roles within the class structure that were deemed almost predetermined by many in Victorian English society.
Although the stained glass window design produced by Brown in 1862 cannot perhaps be seen within the same light as some of his more ambitious fine art work, it does still entail elements of the dynamism and strength of commitment to relating factors of the reality around the artist. This, in some respects counters much of the more romantically studied scenes that were, by the 1860s, becoming so much a factor of the fine artists view of the world, particularly in England where the reality of life under the industrial revolution was, if anything, either under documented by the art world, or not deemed a subject worth portraying through the subject of art. This perhaps says much about the relationship between art and industry in England during the nineteenth century, but also perhaps says much about the disassociation between wealthy and poor, with those who could afford it living in areas that saw little if any disturbance from the industrial revolution, at least in the respect of the working class, belching chimneys and cramped and substandard accommodation.
In some respects, what artists such as Rossetti and Burne-Jones were doing, were diverting the cultured and rich eye, not always the same thing, from the realities of the contemporary world they lived in. Medieval fantasies helped to create a world of pre-industry, one very often filled with happy and contented workers and indulgent and masters. All of course was a fantasy in the extreme, but the fact that it was indulged for so long must say something relatively profound about the era itself.
Although Brown did also indulge in literary themed narratives and he could never really be portrayed as a fighter for social justice per se, he did bring an occasional element of the contemporary world, including its more questionable practices and suppositions, into the public arena, and perhaps that is all that can be asked of an artist within the context of his own era.
Further reading links:
Ford Madox Brown: Pre-Raphaelite Pioneer
The Art of Ford Madox Brown
Ford Madox Brown: The Unofficial Pre-Raphaelite
Into the Frame: The Four Loves of Ford Madox Brown
The Diary of Ford Madox Brown
Ford Madox Brown: a record of his life and work
Work: Ford Madox Brown's Painting and Victorian Life
Stained Glass and the Victorian Gothic Revival (Studies in Design & Material C)
Beyond Arthurian Romances: The Reach of Victorian Medievalism (Studies in Arthurian and Court)
The Victorian World Picture
Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art)
Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)
Reinventing King Arthur: The Arthurian Legends In Victorian Culture (Nineteenth Century Series)
