Ford Madox Brown: The Manchester murals and the matter of history

By Colin Trodd

This book argues that Ford Madox Brown’s murals in the Great Hall of Manchester Town Hall (1878–93) were the most important public art works of their day. Brown’s twelve designs on the history of Manchester, remarkable exercises in the making of historical vision, were semi-forgotten by academics until the 1980s, partly because of Brown’s unusually muscular conception of what history painting should set out to achieve. This ground-breaking book explains the thinking behind the programme and indicates how each mural contributes to a radical vision of social and cultural life. It shows the important link between Brown and Thomas Carlyle, the most iconoclastic of Victorian intellectuals, and reveals how Brown set about questioning the verities of British liberalism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jul 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526142450

Book preview

Introduction

One can study only what one has first dreamed about.¹

Energy is eternal delight … Eternity is in love with the Productions of Time.²

As we go backwards the familiar outlines become blurred; the ideas become fluid, and instead of the simple we find the indefinite.³

This study of the murals in the Great Hall, Manchester Town Hall (1878–93) argues that Ford Madox Brown’s programme was a uniquely ambitious attempt to reimagine the historical character of human culture in nineteenth-century British painting. In broad terms, the book sets out to identify the matrix of ideas within which work on the project was conducted. The central claim of Part I is that the nature of Brown’s intellectual preoccupations has not been fully appreciated. Here I introduce and explain a set of critical terms – the ‘Eye of History’, ‘Life Dream’, ‘everyday vision’, ‘gusto’, ‘activist art’ – that appear in the Part II. One aim of this conceptual arrangement is to understand why Brown distinguished between public history, the realm of sanctified facts, and quotidian history, the domain of common humanity. A series of extensive case studies begins with Chapter 3. There, and in the two chapters that follow it, I argue that Brown created the Manchester murals to challenge normative descriptions of History Painting, where the image is a description of the ideality of forms. Part II of the book, which examines all twelve works in the cycle, presents Brown’s teeming world as a manifestation of a cognitive style that favoured chaotic accretions and cobbled-together parts over and above structured wholes and rationalised compositions. In bald terms, then, this book has been designed to contribute to our understanding of Brown’s theory and practice of art by proposing that the eruptive nature of the Manchester murals confirms the distinctiveness of his vision of history as dynamic movement and unequal social exchange.⁴

The book provides an interpretation of the predominating critical pattern of the cycle rather than isolated readings of selected panels within the cycle. I present the Manchester murals as important examples of Brown’s interest in the history of the machinery for public action, which he characterised as the struggle between popular sovereignty and systems of social authority. My starting position is that Brown’s works are the outcomes of a creative imagination drawn to signs of disturbance in social and cultural situations. By spotlighting the radical nature of Brown’s historical vision, I want to stress that his works were argumentative in nature: the viewer is confronted with a juddering, ever-moving world where stitched-together spaces are expressive of struggle and conflict between social agents.⁵ It goes without saying that the academic theory of correlation – the belief that the main pictorial elements must cohere – does not pertain to Brown’s convoluted and rumbustious murals. Ford Madox Hueffer, his grandson, referred to some of these matters in his brilliant biography, where he noted that regularity and unity – important compositional markers in the language of traditional History Painting – do not feature in Brown’s exuberant art.⁶ For Hueffer, ‘[Brown’s] work was never suave, never quite complete; but it was vigorous and honest to the end, always instinct with a noble feeling for style … His incompleteness was always personal, and that is surely no small deodand, in an age whose general tendency is towards mechanical finish.’⁷

This sentiment – that artistic ‘incompleteness’ was a way of registering that the world was unfinished – is congruent with the view put forward by Harold Rathbone, Brown’s last pupil. According to Rathbone, Brown was a master of ‘dramatic force and poetic intensity’; and so, ‘despite … occasional eccentricities of manner’, he ‘occupied the same plane as Shakespeare … and Hogarth’.⁸ The challenge, as described by these commentators, is to orientate the viewer to the dynamic disorderliness in Brown’s world of verve, improvisation and human imperfection. Brown’s signature achievement, in other words, was to create a tenaciously singular art that stood in a purely adversarial relation to the dicta and customs of standard academic discourse and practice.

If these insights into Brown’s critical model are not sufficient, we have only to consider his attitude to the representation of the past. It is essential to my argument to show that the Manchester murals pivot away from dominant articulations of history. First is the cyclical model, where history is conceived within a moral-equilibrium framework: barbarism is replaced by civic virtue, which is replaced by conquest, which is replaced by luxury and corruption. Second is the developmental model, where history is conceived as continuous incremental social change: pastoralism, feudalism and then commercialism. Third comes the idea that the character of a subject is a localised example of any one formal element within a general typology. Brown’s vision of history is at odds with the set-up of these interpretations, as is indicated in his treatment of subject matter. His focus is on the intermixed worldliness of everyday life. His bodies, like the spaces that surround them, signal disturbance and unruliness. His style is elastic, his forms curvilinear. The Romans building a fort at Mancenion, A.D. 80 (1880) (Plate 1), The Expulsion of the Danes from Manchester, A.D. 910 (1881) (Plate 3) and The Proclamation Regarding Weights and Measures, A.D. 1556 (1883–84) (Plate 6), show awkward and jumbled situations where things are messed up or where hierarchies are questioned. Nothing, they seem to imply, is real unless it is made through struggle.

By proposing this explanatory framework I set out to locate Brown’s mural programme within the vast complexity of Victorian culture and society before determining how and why he approached history as something at once personal and collective. Along the way, I relate Brown’s broader critical interests to the cognate belief systems of Victorian artists and social commentators, many of whom proposed that culture should be renewed through new public platforms utilising the common stimuli of modern social life.⁹ This arrangement enables me to explain Brown’s abiding concern to mutualise experience and to create moments where individuals are made to emphasise the interconnectedness of the social world. The Brown encountered in the following pages sees history through the prism of social relations and never positions himself as the master of a synoptic system above the quotidian fray. In making these large proposals, therefore, this project opens the way for a long-overdue assessment of the relationship between historical vision and plastic thinking in late nineteenth-century British art and culture.¹⁰

Distilled into a simple phrase, Brown’s works attempt to sensitise the viewer to forces that are not visible in academic History Painting or orthodox cultural criticism.¹¹ His subject was the vitality and complexity of the human world. William Michael Rossetti, his son-in-law, noted that Brown had ‘a wide interest in men and things … an interest which, being real and personal, neither disdains this subsidiary familiar element, nor forces the amplified dignified element into artificial and bloodless pomposity’.¹² If Rossetti set out to understand why Brown filled his works with common human matter, then another reaction meant spotlighting how he offered new angles of social vision. For Richard Muther, the distinguished German Art Historian, Brown’s ‘figures stand out stiff and like card kings, without fluency of line or rounded and generalized beauty’. And if he makes ‘no attempt to dilute what is ugly’, this is because he wanted to envisage the ‘intense fullness of life’.¹³ Muther’s line of thought was part of a larger story about how cultural radicalism meant responding to the deadening standardisation of modern life, a topic tackled in Chapters 1 and 2.¹⁴

It is worth noting that Rossetti and Muther recognised that Brown’s art departed from conventional wisdom about composition, which stressed the critical importance of balance and unity. The value of their readings can be summarised without taking me away from my main task, which is to provide an overview of methods and frameworks. For instance, their understanding of pictorial invention encourages the researcher to reconsider the dynamics of Brown’s career without confounding it with generalised narratives about the genesis, development and subsequent fragmentation of Pre-Raphaelitism, surely the most over-determined subject in the vast historiography of Victorian art history. Then again, Rossetti and Muther provide a useful critical framework for attempting to recover the medium in which Brown’s thinking about history and human sociality moved.

To state the second point in another way, the Manchester murals should be related to the political imagination of the period.¹⁵ No one encountering this rather tired-looking statement will need to be told that similar formulations have been made by other auditors, many of whom believe that Brown’s panels were analogues of other ventures designed to celebrate the political and cultural achievements of the ‘heroic urban bourgeoisie’.¹⁶ My point is different, however. Brown’s thoughts on art, culture and public life are far too idiosyncratic to be reduced to the formulae of bourgeois liberal individualism and its vision of continual material progress via competition and manufacturing industry. To insist that the Manchester murals endorse the view that ‘economic materialism’ is ‘the foundation of culture’, or that they valorise the ‘origins of liberal institutional society’, is to distort their meaning.¹⁷ Over the course of this study, I demonstrate that Brown associated social value with something more than profit-making. Nowhere in the mural cycle do we find any support for the liberal vision of the self-generating distributional justice of markets.¹⁸ Neither did Brown support the neo-orthodox proposition that modern History Painting produced a synoptic account of the emergence of the nation state through the development of trade and technology, or that it provided a record of the political legitimation of the business classes through subjects illustrative of the rise of contract-based civil and governmental life.¹⁹ From Brown’s perspective, traditional History Painting was nothing more than the hypostatisation of aristocratic and bourgeois-liberal modes of sovereignty.

Just as the Manchester murals challenge the liberal view of society, so they respond to a common problem in nineteenth-century political thought: how is individual human life reproduced in social relationships? This question, which focuses on how subjects make sense of the situations in which they live, relates to two recurring themes in Brown’s productions: an interest in the connection between the individual and group consciousness; and the association of representation with the vivid materiality of the world.²⁰ These and related matters featured in the art of William Hogarth and William Blake – Brown’s great precursors – both of whom set out to find new, albeit vastly different, expressions of animacy in the world.²¹ Like Hogarth and Blake, Brown defined art as humanised vision of history, an approach which did not collapse human activity into human economic activity. All three artists were knowing, active subjects concerned with exploring the worldliness of art as a channel for communicating human vitality and individual autonomy. Once this is understood, it becomes possible to see that Brown’s modelling of Manchester was his way of imagining an activist version of history where liberty meant more than the model of continual social progress outlined in discourses of liberalism. The purpose of the murals, I argue, was to redirect debate about History Painting by aligning it with many of the matters Brown encountered in daily life. This notion, where the world is seen as social organism, provides an introductory context for looking at Brown’s version of Manchester, where he emphasises different iterations of craft society and civic impulse, not economic development culminating in political liberalism and industrial society. All things considered, Brown had no material interest in producing a history of the realisation of a free market economy, nor do any of his murals put forward the view that industrial life gives human history a sense of cohesion or direction.

For Brown, History Painting is presented as a site of irregularity and conflict, a space where figures are brought together to illustrate opposing values. In approaching History Painting in this manner, he cast the artist as the figure who sees into life past and present. As he saw it, history could not be represented through the means of the pictorial tableau. Instead, he set out to produce a composite or intermixed art, a pictorial world where expressiveness is an attribute of common humanity, and where rhetoric is an attribute of social elites.²² History Painting is inscribed into an argument about representing the difference between raw experience and social conventions. This, precisely, is Sidney Colvin’s view of Brown’s art. Colvin, one of the most insightful commentators of the 1870s and 1880s, caught the dramaturgy of Brown’s aesthetic very effectively when he identified him as a prototype for the modern artist: ‘Mr Brown is one of the most acute and imaginative of pictorial realists, whose great preoccupation is to represent a scene – if he has seen it, as it was – if he has imagined it, as it might have been … He has the most vivid apprehension of external fact, and an equally vivid apprehension of spiritual processes.’²³

At this point it is worth saying a few words about the physical appearance of the Manchester murals. They are, in the main, somewhat cumbrous. At the same time, they depict a world entanglingly alive and rich in eruptive potential. Additionally, they facilitate an understanding of history as struggle and conflict, as seen in The Trial of Wyclif, A.D. 1377 (1885–86) (Plate 5), John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle, A.D. 1753 (1888–90) (Plate 10) and The Opening of the Bridgewater Canal, A.D. 1761 (1891–92 (Plate 11). Here, and in other panels, the historical subject is inserted into a world brimming with disjunctive details. Thus, typically, Brown exploits the narrow horizontal format of the panels to focus on situations where figures are aligned or misaligned with popular energies. For Brown, then, the image was a reworking of work and effort in history, not a vehicle for the projection of verisimilitude nor a platform for the display of didacticism. The Manchester murals do not persuade through the provision of polite forms; instead, they provide the viewer with the opportunity to become a participant in protean expressions of life.²⁴

In any case, the point of this description is that it engages with one of the key features of Brown’s pictorial logic: his spectator is presented with raw and unbalanced situations, not polished and completed compositions. I suspect that by the time Brown came to Manchester he had realised that the traditional model of History Painting, where compositional stability depends on the coordination of all plastic elements, was not a profitable way of looking at and representing historical life. He wanted artworks to engage with source material and to confirm that lived experience meant movement of one kind or another. This explains why he brings many of his figures into intimate contact with the viewer, and why some of the Manchester murals register shifting viewpoints. At the same time, he was drawn to the vision of history as vitalised drama and imaginative energy, a set of social and political spaces in which different versions of human identity are generated, promoted – and contested. Coming yet closer to another theme of my book, Brown’s critical ambitions did not emerge in an intellectual vacuum. For instance, the model of culture outlined in the murals recalls Thomas Carlyle’s attitude to looking into the past, which meant attending to the struggle between energy and order. These critical models of seeing have their corollary in the strand of Romanticism pioneered by Blake, and extended by John Ruskin and William Morris, for whom human growth was explained in terms of the revelations engendered by work-craft, not technological development.²⁵

Thus far I have stressed some of the complicating factors in Brown’s relationship with culture, history and politics. At this point, however, I want to consider how these topics have been treated by historians of Victorian art. For some commentators, Brown’s contributions to the art world were shaped or determined by impersonal and largely negative forces. For the most part, proponents of this model, which I will call ideological, have postulated that his works converged with many of the general practices of industrial society. Conversely, proponents of another type of thought, which I will call cultural, are inclined to distance Brown from the theorems associated with mainstream Victorian cultural life. For the most part, advocates of this line of thought question the claim that verism explains the nature and complexity of an art practice that attended to unruliness and unevenness in the human world.²⁶

One of the many merits of the cultural account is that it stresses the intricacy of Brown’s works and the scale of his ambition for modern painting. This form of investigation acknowledges the importance of the material conditions in which Brown worked, but it disputes the idea that his paintings should be viewed as the products of a wider economic system. Furthermore, by recognising that Brown reflected on the nature of representation it avoids treating painting as little more than a passive medium for the display of the critical power of the modern-day academic.²⁷ It points to the fact that the historical subject has the capacity to be something more than an individual who must stand in a position of appropriation in relation to a public sphere dominated by the power of capital and market forces. It is a form of thinking that generates crucial questions: Why do these works look like this? What do they tell us about Brown’s motivations and intentions? How should we understand their copiousness? Put another way, the cultural model amounts to a strong statement in favour of the inherent meaningfulness of Brown’s project as cultural agent.²⁸

This study recognises the intrinsic strengths of this form of historiography but notes that its agenda has not been fully realised. It provides an account of what the Manchester murals contributed to debates about the relationship between historical representation and social criticism. It considers why Brown associated culture with common existence, and how this social perception relates to some aspects of the internal dynamic of his designs. Furthermore, as it sets out to contribute to the critical history of Victorian culture, it will have to say something about the antagonistic nature of Brown’s model of painting. All the same, the starting point for this reappraisal of the Manchester murals must be a detailed account of some of the limitations of the ideological model.

The ideological model associates the Victorian artist with the reproduction of external values and meanings. From this perspective, Brown was unable to liberate himself from hegemonal forces since he offered no resistance to market-driven modernity. This attitude can be characterised as a discourse of critical failure where the artist, complicit with the commercialisation of the aesthetic sphere, inhabits the world by embodying a condition of critical exhaustion. In some of the more extreme versions of this doctrine, the artist is little more than a self-depleting entity; there are no significant forces with which the subject can collaborate, or to which he or she can appeal. As implied, this framework imposes a distorting perspective on Brown’s art, since it cannot begin to explain why he thought painting could function as a critical practice addressing social and cultural problems.

It is time to move from the summary observations just given to the provision of a relevant case study, one which reveals the central problem of the ideological model. It is an example, we are told, of ‘the willingness of a Victorian artist to replicate his own work slavishly for a fee’.²⁹ The painting in question is Brown’s Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois (1877) (Figure 0.1). The writer, David Phillips, the curator of an Arts Council exhibition held in 1986, continues in the same vein: ‘The texture of the paint, which never had much chance in the face of Brown’s laborious search for truth to detail, is exceptionally dry and tortured.’³⁰ Note the process here: the painting is synonymous with mechanisation, the reduction of work to a condition of deadening manufacture. If this view is correct, then the defining characteristic of Brown’s mindset was the unprincipled and insatiable pursuit of financial profit, since the ‘search for truth’ would be no more than a mechanism for monetising painting.³¹

In fact, the reverse is true, as noted in The Times’s obituary, which recognised that Brown ‘painted not for money, or even fame’.³² Nor should it be forgotten that Brown was inspired by the account of the organisation of modern social life proposed in Carlyle’s Past and Present (1843), where what is called the ‘Gospel of Mammonism’ is described in lacerating terms: ‘We call it a Society; and go about professing openly … separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due Laws-of-war, named fair competition and so forth, it is a mutual hostility. We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings.’³³ The appeal of such a vision to Brown is unsurprising, for he never subscribed to the theory of economic individualism. Immediately, however, we are drawn to ask: what other aspects of Carlyle’s reading of British history and society are relevant to a discussion of Brown’s art?

Figure 0.1 Ford Madox Brown, Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois , 1877

In what follows, I want to pay sustained attention to Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois, an extraordinarily spiky and intricate image in which the viewer encounters many of the critical features Brown developed in the Manchester mural cycle. Brown’s painting remodels an established cultural form, the solitary subject set within community life, to create the impression that Cromwell’s unusual presence indicates his experience of trying to shape historical forces. To put the point in another way, as in the writings of Carlyle, Brown’s nearest cultural homologue – and from whom he took this subject – the viewer is given a moment of raw turbulence, not a smooth episode from the period of the Protectorate.³⁴ Agitated and full of nervous energy, the restless Cromwell inserts himself into an image defined by the trappings of state power. This vital figure, of ‘almost colossal proportions’, is at once the axial point, a place where all things converge, and a point of disturbance who struggles to direct the contents of his experience to John Milton and Andrew Marvell, the obedient scribes in the background.³⁵

Like Carlyle, Brown presents us with a group of people who are in the process of realising that they cannot direct the energies of the world. On top of this, the vast-conceiving Cromwell, who wants to reshape Europe, belongs to a community of one. Behind Cromwell, we see a map of the region where the besieged Protestants of the Vaudois lived. In front of Cromwell, Brown includes a copy of his Declaration inviting the people of England and Wales to fast in support of their beleaguered allies. Brown isolates his figures from the lifeworld of state power by pushing them to the edges of the pictorial field. Cromwell may stab the map, but he cannot change history. Nor can he successfully control his environment: the light cast on the wall, made to resemble a thought cloud emanating from his head, indicates this is a situation where signs do not generate real-world effects. Brown attempts to ‘socialise’ Cromwell; in the course of doing so, he places him at the periphery of the social system of governance. In consequence, Cromwell’s worldview is subsumed by a raw and unstable pictorial world. He is, in this respect, an affirmation of Brown’s concern with the representation of the relationship between individual mentality and graphic vitality. In whatever way we engage with the spatial structure of Brown’s unusual design, we are forced to acknowledge that Cromwell inhabits an enclosed space at once close-to-hand and unsettling.³⁶

These pictorial characteristics, in fact, confirm Brown’s uncompromising attitude to the operational nature of the art world. Far from surrendering himself to the world of money, Brown set out to make a confrontational or activist art, to make what Hueffer called ‘violent emotion’ the subject of historical representation.³⁷ In this regard, Cromwell Protector of the Vaudois is akin to what George Eliot called ‘exhaustive argumentative perception’: it shows a figure struggling to engender social wholeness through a combination of intense inwardness and emphatic individualism.³⁸ Rather like Carlyle, for whom the unmoored Cromwell was an ‘inarticulate prophet … who could not speak’, Brown’s angular Lord Protector is an incongruous form struggling to become a logical pattern, a coherent manifestation of interior energy.³⁹ Cromwell’s fate, the viewer is led to suppose, is to be suspended in a position between self and society, to point in the direction of a process of transformation he cannot perform. To put it another way, human life and the social order, as seen by Brown and Carlyle, required a set of powers against which they could be measured. It followed, then, that both writing and painting were expressions of conflict, attempts to understand and uncover how confusion exists within the world.⁴⁰

In the account I have presented, Cromwell is a vehicle for projecting an image of common, not elite, culture. His strange and uncomfortable position – thrusting into the right flank of the image – provides a sense of figural presence. To press the point home, Brown makes Cromwell the medium for the expression of the idea that the painted image is continuous with the material appearance of objects and bodies in the real world. That Cromwell’s physicality is a sign of an innovative approach to pictorial design is confirmed when we recall that standard discourses on History Painting stressed the importance of planimetric pictorial composition, a cooperation of the surface parts. By contrast, Brown’s energised and defiant Cromwell, who embodies internalised action, emphasises the awkwardness of the experience of being in the world. As will be discovered in Chapters 1 and 2, this interest in eruptive situations and attitudes suggests what Carlyle called the ‘Eye of History’, an act of collaborative looking between reader and author designed to resist the mimetic features of traditional historical discourse.

To abridge a complex matter, the ‘Eye of History’ relates to Brown’s method of cultural analysis, which starts by acknowledging the human complexity of historical situations. Whatever way we consider Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois, it is evident that Brown’s unconventional Lord Protector is designed to make his audience speculate on how the elements of life relate to each other. On the one hand, Cromwell’s physicality affirms his status as a figure of civil authority and source of political sovereignty. On the other hand, history tells us that this specific rehearsal of power politics led to nothing. Characteristically, Brown eschews many of the conventional methods of academic composition by transforming Cromwell into an agent of jagged authenticity, a subject set aside on the edge of his own world. This critical attitude is amplified through the orchestration of plastic elements: the pictorial surface, charged with energy, denotes the struggle between subjects and the social forces that would organise them.

An additional observation is relevant to this capsule summary of the painting. If Brown’s Cromwell is the eruption of energy into life – the incarnation of forces seeking release from conventions of linear design and compositional order – then this interest in raw activity can be conceptualised by invoking the term grotesque. Briefly stated, this concept was used by a variety of important commentators including Georg Wilhelm Hegel, Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Carlyle and Ruskin, for whom it was a way of illustrating the discordant nature of the powers at work in social and cultural modernity.⁴¹ From their point of view, the grotesque, predicated on the idea of the fierce, restless exuberance of nature, described forms and processes that embodied struggle. The grotesque pointed to a dimension of modern existence in which the constructed world of appearances and the world of sensuous life were conflated. Which means, in short, the grotesque was a way of relaying the experience of existence as violent change through the development of an intermixed aesthetic.⁴²

The peculiar confluence of the ‘Eye of History’ and the grotesque is the origin of the critical power of Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois. By emphasising these features it is possible to correct the conventional storyline, where Victorian painting is dismissed as inert, calcified and repetitive middle-brow stuff generated by status-hungry artists for middle-class consumers unsure of their own cultural identity.⁴³ My narrative proposes that too much attention has been given to the thesis that Victorian painting was conditioned by bourgeois society.⁴⁴ For example, Phillips’s approach, which gained in popularity during the era of ‘new art history’, retreats from any engagement with Brown’s conception of the subject of modern art because Phillips needs to believe that Brown’s art is captured by the bourgeois psyche. From this perspective, Brown exists within the substratum of creativity, and so, in identifying painting with the need mechanically to transcribe visual information, he becomes an organisational being rather than a cultural agent. In urging us to see things in this way, Phillips turns Brown into a representative of what he most despised about Victorian society: the rootless, selfish, unfettered pursuit of profit maximisation and the general marketisation of human experience.

The credibility of this school of thought, where Brown’s art is folded into a broader category named Victorian philistinism, is called into question when we consider how and why Brown set out to be a socially engaged subject. Naturally, this means taking seriously the proposition that not all modes of nineteenth-century socialisation were repressive. One advantage of this approach is that it recognises the complex relationship between creativity, work and the commercial aspect of the Victorian art world. Another is that it encourages the researcher to question the verities of the ideological model, where Brown’s art is treated as a localised version of the atrophy of authentic experience within capitalist production and commercialised culture.⁴⁵ Of course, to get this formulation under control, we need to address the question Phillips avoids: why did Brown replicate Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois? Without going into too much detail, it is evident that he wanted to reconfigure History Painting along the same lines as models of nationhood put forward by post-Chartist radicals, many of whom swerved away from post-Restoration accounts of national identity.⁴⁶ From Brown’s perspective, Cromwell – the incarnation of the common voice and oppositional culture – mattered.⁴⁷ Hueffer is surely right to affirm that Cromwell’s ‘virile personality exercised a strong influence’ on Brown’s mind.⁴⁸ As Brown imagined it, this raw and vital example of the fusion of populism and radicalism was an inflection point in British history. Brown’s Diary informs us that Cromwell was a ‘great man’, an interpretation shared by fellow radicals who aimed to create an activist iconography of nationhood based on popular rights, social energies and the interests of the producing classes.⁴⁹

These considerations, which are rooted in the idea of a common politics of culture, are immensely significant when we reflect on how Brown’s sense of social being coloured his actions as an artist. This process of critical engagement starts with the recognition that Brown conceptualised creativity in terms of the expressiveness of labour. Cultural life meant the experience of work and the experience of work opened the subject to the possibility of the ownership of the things produced by labour. In turn, by reflecting on his belief system, it becomes possible to take seriously the idea of agency: how Brown engaged with the institutions of the Victorian art world; why he developed certain patterns of work; and how he generated specific critical instruments to deal with emergent social and patronal domains. The replica, I want to suggest, was one example of Brown’s wish to give physical expression to imaginative experience. This does not mean it was the defining feature of his aesthetic. It did mean that he could use it to perpetuate a vision of common culture. It also meant that he had a critical technology for promoting his cultural authority by questioning the conviction that images lose value through multiplication. Seen in these terms, the replica operated within a discursive system of communication, at the centre of which was the definition of the artist as social actor and owner and director of labour.

With this in mind, it is time to move closer to offering an appraisal of Brown’s relationship with the Victorian art world. From the very beginning, he defined art as a technique of imaginative production which related to wider social technologies of knowledge. At no time was he motivated by the need to churn out replicas to satisfy the non-cognitive needs of the market. There was an internal consistency and coherency among the parts of his career. We see this when his dealings with critics, collectors, agents, dealers, exhibition bodies, art institutions and cultural administrators are taken into consideration. Another example is the idea of replication as an instrument that allowed the artist to imagine a cultural programme by which he or she might prosper within a self-sufficient art world. On this reckoning, the replica affirmed the organic connection between life and work. It is in consequence a mistake to view Brown as a figure whose significance is determined by the operational logic of the Victorian art market.

If Phillips’s thesis were an isolated case it would clearly be wrong to draw any general conclusions. Yet, it is well known, of course, that other commentators have favoured his kind of thinking, where paintings are manufactured to satisfy the material needs of the control group at the centre of the Victorian art world. In considering this matter we need look no further than a landmark essay by Albert Boime, who argued that Brown’s most famous painting, Work (1852–65) (Figure 0.2), another example of replication, followed the ‘middle-of-the road solutions’ to social unrest put forward by middle-class reformers. From Boime’s point of view, Brown’s concept of social reality expressed the economic mentality of Victorian liberalism articulated by the business middle classes.⁵⁰

But there is a wider point here, which bears on the development of Boime’s argument. For instance, he proposes that Brown, unprepared to confront the tensions within industrial capitalism, was unable to recognise the truth conferred on industrialised work by Marx and Engels, and so he did not follow their argument ‘for a return to authentic human relationships based on spontaneity and fulfilling work’.⁵¹ In truth, the opposite is the case, since Brown recapitulated the interests of the early, Romantic-leaning, Marx, whose theory of culture was concerned with the critical potential of human vitality. A serious difficulty with Boime’s reading is that he treats Brown as a metonym for the alleged ideological weakness of the Victorian art world: Work cannot account for the reality of human alienation behind the façade of economic rationality. It is worth pointing out that Boime believes it was possible for some agents to see beyond the distortions of the Victorian social order: the factory proletariat had the capacity to become autonomous subjects because they had the potential to plan their work and ‘control’ what he calls, somewhat mysteriously, ‘the finished product’.⁵²

Such, then, is the view of politics proposed by Boime. What he fails to appreciate is that although Brown was not, in the 1850s, aware of the structural significance of the factory system