Ford Madox Brown: The Manchester murals and the matter of history

Ford Madox Brown: The Manchester murals and the matter of history
ISBN-10
1526142457
ISBN-13
9781526142450
Series
Ford Madox Brown
Category
Art
Pages
276
Language
English
Published
2022-07-19
Publisher
Manchester University Press
Author
Colin Trodd

Description

This book argues that Ford Madox Brown’s murals in the Great Hall of Manchester Town Hall (1878–93) were the most important public art works of their day. Brown’s twelve designs on the history of Manchester, remarkable exercises in the making of historical vision, were semi-forgotten by academics until the 1980s, partly because of Brown’s unusually muscular conception of what history painting should set out to achieve. This ground-breaking book explains the thinking behind the programme and indicates how each mural contributes to a radical vision of social and cultural life. It shows the important link between Brown and Thomas Carlyle, the most iconoclastic of Victorian intellectuals, and reveals how Brown set about questioning the verities of British liberalism.

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