Ford Madox Brown's Manchester Town Hall Murals

Ford Madox Brown's Manchester Town Hall Murals (1879-1893) make for ideal "case-studies" of the after-effects of the PRB on English art in the last quarter of the 19th century. The 12 paintings operate as a kind of "Stations of the Cross" telling the story of Mancunian civic pride and leadership in the Industrial Revolution (no depiction of the famous Peterloo slaughter, for instance). Eight of the twelve were painted directly on the wall in a quasi-fresco technique. The other four were painted on canvas and then mounted directly on the wall. 

Today in class, each student is going to randomly select one of the twelve murals and subject it to a close reading. What is going on in the narrative (the story depicted)? What is going on in formal terms (how is it painted, composed, colored, etc)? How does your mural embody or challenge some of the major ideas and themes explored by the PRB? Look closely. "Read" the symbols and cues. Magnify the image. Click on the relevant background information. Be prepared to make a brief (5 minutes) presentation to the class after about 30 minutes of preparation. 

Here are two good sources for information about Brown's murals:

Victorianweb.org

Julie Codell's essay "Ford Madox Brown, Carlyle, Macaulay and Bakhtin: The Pratfalls and Penultimates of History" appeared in the journal Art History (September 1998).

Abstract

Ford Madox Brown’s Manchester Town Hall mural series was the site of late Victorian contentions about both history and history painting. A long-standing discourse of history, represented in Manchester’s many local histories and guidebooks, debated the ‘facts’ and significance of Manchester’s history and contributions to British history. Brown’s murals participated in this debate at the very moment of the city’s new emergence as an independent municipality with its own self-government and new rebuilding projects.

Brown’s murals commented on this discourse through imagery and the accompanying narratives he wrote. Unlike his earlier narratives for paintings, these narratives were not about Brown’s ideas and intentions. Instead, they incorporated the new historical language of satire, displacement and factual ambiguity. Brown was an avid reader of Carlyle and Macaulay who, despite their differences, shared innovative methods; a criticism of cause and effect; and a focus on quotidian, collective, and anonymous actors and motives. Brown employed their methods, including passages from Carlyle’s French Revolution, to satirize official history. His selection of ‘minor’ details and figures foregrounded the selection process itself and problematized historical content, as did Carlyle’s and Macaulay’s methods.

Brown’s relationship to history painting, however, was not satirical. He admired Dyce, Maclise and the German Nazarenes without imitating their idealism. Brown eschewed high seriousness, diluted important events with banal incidents, put crucial events in the street rather than the court, and juxtaposed ‘heroes’ with anonymous passers-by to interrogate notions of idealism and heroism. Respectfully quoting Maclise’s works through visual reversals, Brown conveyed his own `reversal’ away from idealism toward the revisionism of Carlyle and Macaulay.

The murals authored and authorized Manchester history. Bakhtin’s themes of the carnival, novelization, surprise and the ‘word with a loophole’ illuminate how the murals forged a new civic history built on collectivity, working-class contributions, and corporate capital. Radical in his support for the working class, Brown was also nationalistic in his expression of Manchester’s English pedigree and mercantile hegemony. His murals express innovations and contradictions in their melding of Manchester history into broader Victorian discourses of history, history painting, British hegemony and the Empire, while offering criticism of cherished Victorian ideals and revealing the depths of Brown’s own intellectual comprehension of changing Victorian notions of history.