Ford Madox Brown and Magenta

Ford Madox Brown said that his favourite colour was magenta. He was playing the parlour game of ‘My Favourite Things’ on 2 October 1866 at his new home, 37 Fitzroy Square. It was the beginning of a new phase of life for him. He had just moved from Highgate to fashionable and expensive Fitzrovia where his salon would become a focus for London’s intelligentsia over the next decade. The previous year 1865 he had staged a landmark retrospective exhibition. William Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, paid a surprise visit and shook the artist by the hand. The show and the gesture catapulted Madox Brown into the public arena. He had sold over two thousand catalogues at sixpence each, and more than three thousand people had paid a shilling for entrance to gaze at his pictures of half a lifetime.

Magenta was a colour which suited his new, exuberant mood. It was also a startlingly modern colour, only recently invented and named after the Battle of Magenta on 4 June 1859, one of the decisive moments during the Second Italian War of Independence when the French-Sardinian alliance defeated the much larger forces of retreating Austrians. Madox Brown loved France where he had been brought up and whose language he always spoke. Equally with loving France, he loathed tyranny. Thus choosing magenta held many layers of political associations as well as practical application for Madox Brown the radical.

Unlike traditional artists’ pigments made from natural substances, magenta was one of the earliest to be made by chemical extraction. Aniline was first extracted from heated indigo in Germany in 1826. In London, in the mid-1850s, William Henry Perkin attempted to synthesize quinine from aniline and found that one of the products of the reaction was violet. Three years later he patented mauve - French for mallow flower - under the name mauveine, the first synthetic dye in the world. In the year of the Battle of Magenta, François Emmanuel Verguin synthesized another brilliant new colour, similar to the fuchsia flower, which he patented as fuchsin. It began the vogue for scintillating, off-beat, deep purply pinks with hints of blue and burgundy known as fuchsia, solferino (named after another bloody battle in the same campaign for Italian independence) and magenta.

When you look at some of Madox Brown’s most famous pictures, you can see how magenta had been spicing his palette for years although he would have made it previously with pigments such as alizarin crimson, white and ultramarine. Hints of fuchsia, mauve and magenta fluttered in Emma’s bonnet ribbons as well as on her lips when she posed on bitter wintry days as the emigrating wife for The Last of England in 1852.

 

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