The Last of England (painting)

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The Last of England (Ford Madox Brown)
The Last of England
Ford Madox Brown , 1852–1855
Oil on canvas
82.5 × 75.0 cm
Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery

The Last of England is the title of a painting by Ford Madox Brown , a Pre-Raphaelite painter . The work was created between 1852 and 1855 and is part of the inventory of the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery in Birmingham , England . It shows British emigrants on a ship off the English coast.

background

Great Britain has seen an increasing wave of emigration to its colonies since the 1830s, particularly to South Africa, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. A million Irish people left their island between 1846 and 1851 as a result of a famine in Ireland . In 1852, when Brown began work on the painting, about 350,000 people emigrated to England alone.

plant

In the foreground, close to the ship's railing, sits a young couple close together. The two people look forward with unmoved and closed faces, past the viewer. Both are wrapped up in warm clothes, the man holds an umbrella in front of his wife to protect her from the spray. Behind the couple, and partially covered by them, is a family; a woman is holding onto her boy, a blonde girl, who is eating a green apple, clings to a rope and peers in the direction of the viewer. An apparently female figure with a long, thin, white tobacco pipe looks back at a man who is holding a wine bottle under his arm and, with a grinning face, shakes his clenched fist in the direction of the coast, a companion with a similarly grotesque expression shows his approval of the gesture . In the back of the ship, a boy is sorting vegetables in the lifeboat. The background is the stormy sea, at the top right of the picture the coast of Dover , the last of England , with its white cliffs can be seen in the distance , in front of it a steamship that leaves a narrow thread of smoke behind.

The Last of England (detail)

The couple in the foreground can be identified as middle class by their clothing and therefore do not belong to the typical stratum of emigrants. In contrast, the group in the middle distance, which Ford Madox Brown described itself as an “honorable family of the greengrocer type”, depicts British emigrants just as significantly as the man who shakes his fist in the direction of England and represents someone who has been expelled from the country. "The educated are more tied to their country than the uneducated, who are mostly concerned with food and physical comfort," wrote Ford Madox Brown.

While the people in the middle and back of the ship gesticulate with their hands, cling to them or grab food, wine bottles and tobacco pipes with them, the couple in front hold their hands; she holds his right hand, which is clad in a fine glove, and in her bare left you can see another tiny hand: that of her baby, which she has in her arms under her protective cloak. The bizarre-looking cabbage heads, hung on the railing for the long journey, are ignored by the couple, in contrast to the diligent inspection of the vegetables in the back of the ship.

Emergence

The Last of England . Pencil study, 1852
Ford Madox Brown: Emma Hill , 1852
Ford Madox Brown: Cathy Madox Brown , 1853

The reason for the picture was the emigration of the Pre-Raphaelite sculptor Thomas Woolner , who hoped for an improvement in his material situation in Australia; however, he returned to England a few years later. A pencil study of The Last of England from 1852 refers to the inspiration of Woolner's decision with the name of the ship on the lifeboat, White Horse Lin [e] of Australi [a] . William Holman Hunt , Pre-Raphaelite painter, had thought of emigration for reasons similar to Woolner's. Brown, who lived with Emma Hill, model and lover and already mother of a daughter, had meanwhile considered starting a new life with his family in India.

Ford Madox Brown took himself and his family as models for the picture. The couple in the foreground shows himself and Emma Hill, whom he married in 1853. The little blonde girl in the background with an apple in her mouth is his and Emma's daughter Catherine Emily, born in 1850. Emma Hill gave birth to a son, Oliver, in 1855; a little hand of the newborn, projected in the pencil study, appears in The Last of England under the cloak in the woman's hand.

Brown only painted the figures and their family models outdoors in cold weather in order to come as close as possible to the conditions of the harsh weather at sea. Although the painter was very close to the Pre-Raphaelite circle and, among others, had a significant artistic influence on Dante Gabriel Rossetti , he never became a member of their brotherhood . In The Last of England and its contemporary subject, however, he took into account the ideas of the same, which sought to revive the Middle Ages and the Renaissance , by choosing the round picture, the tondo , a format preferred in the Italian Renaissance. Ford Madox Brown wrote a sonnet for the painting in February 1865 :

“... The last of England! O'er the sea, my dear,
Our homes to seek amid Australian fields,
Us, not our million-acred island yields
The space to dwell in. Thrust out. Forced to hear
Low ribaldry from sots, and share rough cheer
From rudely nurtured men. The hope youth builds
Of fair renown, bartered for that which shields
Only the back, and half-formed lands that rear
The dust-storm blistering up the grasses wild.
There learning skills not, nor the poets dream,
Nor aught so loved as children shall we see. "
She grips his listless hand and clasps her child;
Through rainbow tears she sees a sunnier gleam,
She cannot see a void, where he will be.

“... England out of sight! Overseas, my dear,
we are looking for a home between Australia's fields,
because our home island does not have
the space for us to live on millions of hectares . Pushed out. Ear-witnesses against the will of
the foul drunkard nonsense and of the raw applause
from bad -behaved men. The youth's hope
for a good reputation, exchanged for some protection
just for the back, and for a half-finished country
where sandstorms rage over the wild grass, and where
neither scholarship nor the poet's dreams,
nor anything is loved as children. "
She takes his motionless hand, clutching her child;
the sun shimmers through the rainbow of her tears,
she cannot see the void as long as he is by her side.

Provenance

In September 1855 the art dealer DT White acquired the picture together with the preliminary drawing from 1852 before selling both to the collector BG Windus. In 1891 the painting and study were acquired by the Birmingham Art Museum , now the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery . Two oil studies in different colors have been preserved. A watercolor replica Ford Madox Brown made in the 1860s is in the Tate Gallery in London .

reception

In 1987, the British artist and film director Derek Jarman named his film The Last of England , in which he dealt with the cultural situation in Great Britain in the 1980s, after the painting by Ford Madox Brown.

literature

  • Günter Metken : Pre-Raphaelites . Exhibition catalog Baden-Baden 1973–1974, pp. 52–53.
  • John Hollander: The Gazer's Spirit. Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art. University of Chicago Press, 1995 pp. 167-170 (English; incomplete) .

Web links

Commons : The Last of England  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery provide in Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource with Silverlight a possibility to enlarge the painting, which makes the details visible.
  2. ↑ Quoted from: Günter Metken: Pre-Raphaelites . (1973/74), p. 52
  3. ^ John Hollander: The Gazer's Spirit . (1995) p. 167.
  4. ↑ Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery: Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource
  5. ^ English version in: John Hollander: The Gazer's Spirit , 1995, p. 167.
  6. ↑ Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery: Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource
  7. ^ The watercolor The Last of England in the Tate Gallery, London