From Paint to Print: Nonno's
Legacy
A talk given at the 'Ford Madox
Ford: Visual Arts and Media' conference, University
of Genoa, Italy
19 September 2007
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If Ford Madox Brown was
a painter who thought like a novelist, his grandson Ford Madox
Ford was a writer who thought like an artist. Both were ahead
of their times, avant the avant garde. But whereas grandpa was
a painter of super-realism, ‘the first painter in England, if
not in the world, to attempt to render light exactly as it appeared
to him’, his grandson was an impressionist writer, experimenting
with modernist narrative techniques even before James Joyce
or Virginia Woolf.
The questions I’m airing
today are these:
1. Whether Ford Madox Brown’s radical practice as a painter
influenced the way his grandson wrote?
2. Whether it’s possible to perceive influences leaping from
painting to literature, between such apparently different ways
of representing reality?
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Ford
Madox Ford’s lifelong association with painting began as
a child in Ford Madox Brown’s studio where he absorbed his
grandfather’s Pre-Raphaelite principles and literary interests.
Here he is squirming in his high-chair, captured in a caricature
by John Hipkins, as he models for his grandfather. |
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Their mutual intimacy
is apparent a couple of years later in the unswerving
gaze four-year-old Ford returned to Madox Brown when
he posed as William Tell’s Son. Here legendary childhood
innocence and trust is pointed up by the detail of
blood-red arrow marks, incised at the centre of the
split apple. |
As grandfather, Madox Brown
was much more than ‘Nonno’ - he fulfilled the role of
father, mentor, and prototype of the eccentric man of
genius. All his grandchildren, the Madox Brown and the
Rossetti cousinhood, were brought up in the expectation
that each one would be a genius. After the early death
of Ford’s father, Frank Hueffer, the German musicologist,
Madox Brown slipped naturally into the role of paterfamilias,
to his daughter Cathy’s children who lived in his household.
And their interests were not confined to art but were
also distinctly literary. Madox Brown was a great reader,
and opera and theatre-goer.
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| Many of his subjects
were drawn from literature: Chaucer, Shakespeare and
Byron. His love for Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy,
King Lear, spanned a lifetime. The painter’s visual
sense was matched by his love of narrative and anecdote.
‘My grandfather told stories so well that some people
said that he did it better than anybody else in London’,
remembered Ford’s young sister Juliet. Ford inherited
his grandfather’s story-telling skills and invented
stories for his siblings. |
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| Ford’s first
literary works were directly linked with his grandfather.
Madox Brown illustrated Ford’s fairy story, The
Brown Owl, written in his teens for his sister Juliet.
Full of sounds, the story is also brilliant with the pristine
colours of childhood. ‘Through the window-blinds the light
of dawn was already beginning to show itself. So the Princess
went to the window and drew back the curtains, and let the
bright sunlight shine into the room. A beautiful day was
dawning after the last night’s rain, and the sun was rising
brightly over the edge of the blue sea.’ |
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Ford’s biography of his grandfather, published 1896, by
Longman’s. Aesthetic book cover by Walter Crane.
In 1893 his grand-father’s death triggered Ford’s first
major book, The biography
of Ford Madox Brown, an extended study of the artist
who minutely examined character, in his portraits of both
historical figures and of his contemporaries - and did
not fail to inspect his own.
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In The Good Soldier, Ford
made a word-portrait of Edward Ashburnham’s face that could be
artist’s notes: ‘I had forgotten about his eyes. They were as
blue as the sides of a certain type of box of matches. When you
looked at them carefully you saw that they were perfectly honest,
perfectly straightforward, perfectly, perfectly stupid. But the
brick pink of his complexion, running perfectly level to the brick
pink of his inner eyelids, gave them a curious, sinister expression
- like a mosaic of blue porcelain set in pink china. And that
chap, coming into a room, snapped up the gaze of every woman in
it, as dexterously as a conjurer pockets billiard balls.’
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The whole mystery of sexual attraction and
the emergence of the ‘new’ woman was a theme both Fords
explored, in life and in art. Was Valentine Wannop the
new kind of woman in the Tietjens novels, a lineal descendant
of Madox Brown’s second wife, Emma Hill, or his secret
love, Mathilde Blind? Was she a fictional sister of Stella
Bowen and Janice Biala, prepared to live an unconventional
life in a partnership of free love, as Valentine was prepared
to do with Christopher?
The ‘new’ equal relationship of Valentine Wannop and
Christopher Tietjens recalls Madox Brown’s striking joint
portrait of an unusual, early-modern partnership of equals
- Millicent Garrett Fawcett, the women’s rights campaigner,
sharing ideas with her husband, Henry Fawcett, the politician
and Professor of Political Economy, who happened to have
been blinded in a shooting accident.
Ford Madox Brown
Portrait of Henry Fawcett
and Millicent Garrett Fawcett, 1872
oil on canvas, 1086 x 838 mm.
NPG and Bodelwyddan Castle, Wales
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And although twice married, Madox Brown
was inspired by his own extra-marital loves to illustrate
Byron’s poem Don Juan. This is the scene when Haidée,
the pirate’s daughter, finds Don Juan apparently drowned,
washed up on a Greek beach. Her look forecasts a doomed
love affair. Madox Brown persuaded Marie Spartali, the
Greek artist he obsessively loved, who was engaged to
another man, to pose for the figure of Haidée on the extreme
left.
Ford Madox Brown, Don Juan found by Haidée,
1870-73 Oil on canvas, 166.8 x 214.6 cm. 4 versions, this
one Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery
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Many commentators called Ford Madox
Brown ‘the Father of the Pre-Raphaelites’, although he
never joined the Brotherhood founded in 1848 by Rossetti,
Millais and Holman Hunt. His grandson also rejected the
notion that Madox Brown had in some mysterious way ‘fathered’
the iconoclastic group. Instead, he saw his grandfather
as the unacknowledged ‘King of the Pre-Raphaelites’ -
as the cartoonist did, too. Caricature of ‘King F.M.B.’by
John Hipkins pencil, National Library of Scotland For
Ford Madox Ford, his grandfather was King because he was
an innovator. ‘He really did initiate modern art,’ claimed
Ford. ‘He seems to have been the first man in modern days
to see … that aesthetic salvation was to be found not
in changing the painter’s subject, but in changing his
method of looking at and rendering the visible world.
He began trying to paint what he saw.’ And painting what
he actually saw was a radical departure. ‘He was a man
who lived in his eyes and for his eyesight,’ said Ford
when he curated the London show of his grandfather’s pictures
in 1909. Everyone else painted what they thought they
saw, or what previous painters had seen.
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| And by considering
Madox Brown’s hyper-realistic way of seeing things exactly
as they were, in blazing sunlight with beaded droplets of
sweat on Emma’s face in The Pretty Baa-Lambs, or on chill
wintry days with pinched hands in The Last of England, Ford
Madox Brown, The Last of England, (detail) 1852-55, oil
on panel, oval 82.5 x 75 cm, Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery
his grandson identified Madox Brown’s way of making things
new. In Ford’s eyes, his grandfather was a Fauvist before
the Fauves had been invented. Ford Madox Brown, The Hayfield
1855-6, oil on panel, 24 x 33.2, Tate, London ‘It was Madox
Brown who first painted bright purple haycocks - yes, bright
purple ones - upon a bright green field. But he painted
them like that because he happened to notice that when sunlight
is rather red and the sky very blue, the shadowy side of
green-grey hay is all purple. He noticed it, and he rendered
it’. Madox Brown was indeed a man who ‘used to notice such
things’. He recorded them vividly in his Painter’s Diary.
‘What wonderful effects I have seen this evening in the
hay fields, the warmth of the uncut grass, the greeny greyness
of the unmade hay in furrows or tufts… lovely violet shadows…melting
away one tint into another … one moment more & cloud passes
& all the magic is gone.’ Small and intense, his landscapes
were made en plein air, contemporary with some members of
the French Barbizon school, but before Monet brought his
ladies out into the garden. |
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Ford, too,
was a man with a savour for landscape. Reminiscent of the
way Madox Brown had once observed landscape from the top
of an omnibus, Ford’s fictional narrator in The Good Soldier,
John Dowell, watches landscape through train windows. ‘I
like catching the two-forty; I like the slow, smooth roll
of the great big trains…I like being drawn through the green
country and looking at it through the clear glass of the
great windows. Though, of course, the country isn’t really
green. The sun shines, the earth is blood red and purple
and red and green and red. And the oxen in the ploughlands
are bright varnished brown and black and blackish purple…’
Here Ford describes the countryside in the accurate painterly
way he had absorbed from the transposed, hyper-real colours
of Madox Brown’s landscapes. One art form informs another.
For grandfather as for grandson, landscape was a recurring
theme and it was complicated. It was complicated by the
rush to modernity. For Madox Brown the rush to modernity
was triggered by economic crisis in the aftermath of the
industrial revolution. |
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Emigration to the goldfields of Australia
was one response, captured in The
Last of England. For his grandson, people with
pre-war, traditional modes of living and thinking were
stranded in the rush to modernity immediately after 1918.
They were stranded as Madox Brown’s middle-class couple
in The Last of England
had been literally stranded between the old world and
the new, 65 years before. In Last Post, though refracted
through Ford’s innovative literary technique, the influence
of the picture’s mood and non-narrative presentation is
palpable. Ford made one direct reference to The
Last of England in Last
Post. ‘A bugler in the second Hampshires, went
down the path, his bugle shining behind his khaki figure.
Now they would make a beastly row with that instrument.
On Armistice Day they had played the Last Post on the
steps of the church under Marie-Léonie’s windows…The Last
Post!...The Last of England! He remembered thinking that.’
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For the mid-Victorians, society was
on the cusp of radical change. Madox Brown analysed Victorian
society in his epic picture, simply called Work, in which
he raised the manual worker, the humble British navvy,
to heroic status, the centre of Brown’s moral vision and
of the picture. His grandson identified the way the post-war
era stranded pre-war attitudes, just as Victorian social
change and technology stranded the idle rich on their
horses in the background of Work, and as Carlyle and Maurice,
on the picture’s extreme right, looked bemused and stranded.
‘The land had not changed…’ mused Mark Tietjens. ‘There
were still the deep beechwoods making groves beside the
ploughlands and the rooks rising lazily as the plough
came towards them.’
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lazily in Madox Brown’s Carrying
Corn. ‘The land had not changed,’ continued Mark.
‘Well, the breed had not changed…There was [his brother]
Christopher. Only the times…they had changed…The rooks and
the ploughlands and the beeches and Christopher were there
still…But not the frame of mind in the day…The sun might
rise and go above the plough till it set behind the hedge
and the ploughman went off to the inn settle; and the moon
could do the same. But they would - neither sun nor moon
- look on the spit of Christopher in all their journeys.
Never. They might as well expect to see a mastodon.’ This
last word of Mark’s wry analysis - ‘mastodon’ - was characteristic
of Ford’s humour - surprising, almost whimsical, and present
throughout his work. In Last Post, Marie-Léonie, Mark’s
long-term French mistress, reviled the sculptor Rodin. ‘She
was looking…at the poultry - bright chestnut birds, extremely
busy on the intense green of the browsed grass. The great
rooster reminded her of the late Monsieur Rodin,…She had
once seen him in his studio, conducting some American ladies
round his work, and he had precisely resembled a rooster
kicking its leg back and drooping its wings in the dust
round a new hen. Only round a new one. Naturally!...This
rooster was a tremendous Frenchman.’ Marie-Léonie’s views
on the two nations she lived between were inflected with
Fordian wit. England ‘was well enough - a sort of suburb
of Caen: but the people!...no wonder William of Falaise
in Normandy subjugated them with such ease,’ where the cheeky
little half-rhyme - Falaise and ease - points up the joke.
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Unlike the solemn pictures of the Pre-Raphaelites,
Madox Brown had modelled irreverence and humour for his
grandson, particularly with sly touches in the great series
of frescoes he painted for Manchester Town Hall, and with
which Ford grew up. Here is Queen Philippa, wife of Edward
III, arriving in Manchester in the mid-14th century, to
greet her protégés, the Flemish weavers. It’s a Lincoln-green,
springtime scene, imagined with a novelist’s eye for incongruous
detail and humour.
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While weavers unroll
bales of cloth to impress the Queen on her State Visit,
a child sticks her tongue out at another, just beneath
the Queen’s horse.
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As a master-weaver turns away from his work to gaze at
the Queen, his apprentice eyes up a snooty Flemish girl.
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If we can see, as I suggested at the beginning, that Madox
Brown was a novelist in paint and his grandson an artist making
images with words, then the osmosis of influence from one art
form to another, from paint to print, is subtly apparent. Previously
we’ve assumed that novelists learn the art of significant detail
from other writers. It seems that one way of answering the questions
I asked at the beginning -‘Did Ford Madox Brown’s art influence
the way his grandson wrote? And is it possible to identify influences
slipping across from painting to literature?’ - is that it’s
likely that Ford did absorb strategies and techniques from his
grandfather’s pictures and adapted them to new effect in his
fiction.
From his grandfather Ford learned to look with the eyes of
an artist. In The Good Soldier, Leonora in an evening dress
looks like a Wedgwood vase, Florence In a Straw Hat is literally
a picture by Rubens. There are Rembrandt shadows throughout
No More Parades and the brittle Sylvia is encapsulated as the
image of a cruel woman by Burne-Jones. A pilot’s eye view over
northern France in World War One reveals ‘vast slag-heaps …High,
purplish-blue heaps, like the steam domes of engines or the
breasts of women…Bluish purple. More blue than purple. Like
all Franco-Belgian Gobelins tapestry…’ For John Dowell in The
Good Soldier, like Madox Brown and Madox Ford, ‘the whole world
… is like spots of colour in an immense canvas’.
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