Angela Thirlwell's biography Into the Frame: The Four Loves of Ford Madox Brown, Chatto & Windus 2010, is a sort of prequel to her first - William and Lucy: The Other Rossettis published by Yale University Press in 2003. Lucy was the eldest daughter of Ford Madox Brown with his first love, first cousin, and first wife, Elisabeth Bromley. Lucy grew up to know intimately the subsequent three loves in her father’s life: her step-mother, Emma Hill; her fellow art-student and best friend, Marie Spartali; and Mathilde Blind whose portrait she painted and whose radical feminist views she shared – but with whom she implacably fell out. In a curious irony, the only one of Ford Madox Brown’s loves she did not know at all was her own mother Elisabeth Bromley who died before Lucy was three.
When Lucy Madox Brown married William Michael Rossetti in 1874, she made him the son-in-law of Ford Madox Brown and cemented the enduring friendship between the two men. William Michael Rossetti was the younger brother of Dante Gabriel Rossetti who with his girlfriend Lizzie Siddal had been tempestuously close to Madox Brown and his second wife, Emma Hill, especially during the 1850s.
William Michael Rossetti
William Michael Rossetti (1829-1919) was
the only Pre-Raphaelite to work for the Inland Revenue. The Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood's 'catalytic agent' and mythmaker, William kept their
PRB Journal and edited their magazine, The Germ. Radical author
of the Democratic Sonnets, true cosmopolitan, liberal pragmatist,
scholar, writer and romantic, William had a mission to popularise
contemporary art for Victorian audiences. Swinburne thought his
poem Mrs Holmes Grey 'beats everything but Balzac' and artist
John Brett called him 'the best judge [of art] I know after John
Ruskin'. His marriage to Lucy Madox Brown in 1874, documented
by hundreds of surviving letters, was passionate, modern but ultimately
tragic.
Lucy Madox Brown Rossetti
Lucy Madox Brown Rossetti (1843-1894)
was the eldest daughter of Ford Madox Brown, 'father of the Pre-Raphaelites'.
Brilliant and fractious, art was the mainspring of her life. She
blossomed in her father's studio, painting romantic and sometimes
macabre pictures drawn from literature and history, exhibiting
during the 1870s both at the Royal Academy and the more avant-garde
Dudley Gallery. Although art was her true metier, she wrote a
biography of Mary Shelley when tuberculosis made the physical
energies involved in painting at an easel almost impossible. She
married William Michael Rossetti in 1874 and poured her thwarted
artistic ambitions into the ferocious education of their five
frighteningly intelligent children. |
