When the sun
shines brightly over Manchester it affords an opportunity to appreciate some of
the finer qualities of its ornate, Victorian buildings. So did it shine one
recent morning as I walked to the city’s main art gallery to see the
newly-opened exhibition of the works of Ford Maddox Brown: the rays hit the
buildings acutely, lighting up their decorative features and bringing into
sharp relief the intricate detailing of stone, brick and terra-cotta. My eyes
were drawn, for the first time, to three words embossed above the second storey
windows of a grand, commercial, red-brick edifice: HONESTY, PRUDENCE and
PERSEVERANCE. A little further up the road one of the Gallery’s buildings, the
classical, Italianate stone-built Athenaeum, competed for the moral high ground
with its own inscription, carved around the frieze: FOR THE ADVANCEMENT AND DIFFUSION
OF KNOWLEDGE. The buildings on this street could not be described as
ambivalent.
Nor is
ambivalence a feature of the work of Ford Madox Brown. Now recognised as an
innovative, pioneering painter his work created a new style which profoundly influenced
the young Pre-Raphaelites. He was also an original partner in the firm founded
by William Morris in 1861, for which he designed stained-glass windows, textiles,
wallpapers and even furniture. But, despite this diversity, the exhibition of
multi-faceted art created by him is much more than the display of visual
splendour we might expect.
The
passionate colours of his painting and the haunting qualities of its subjects may
be what first command attention but closer inspection reveals layers of social
and political comment implicit in the imagery- an approach which was unique at
the time. Two of his most famous paintings, Work
and The Last of England, demonstrate
this quality most conspicuously but it is to be found in many of his other
works as well. In the latter part of his career he worked - and lived for some
years - in Manchester where he had been commissioned to create murals for the Town
Hall. During this time he participated actively with the life of the city,
leaving traces which we may now delight in detecting through the work he left
behind and the ways in which it intertwines with local history. As an
example, a five-minute walk from the Gallery, there is a statue of President
Lincoln. It is there to commemorate his gratitude to the mill-workers of
Lancashire for the stand they took against slavery despite their consequent
loss of livelihood due to the ensuing blockade of cotton from the southern
states. Back in the exhibition hangs a painting which Brown donated to raise
funds for the relief of those workers.
The location
of the exhibition, placed in a building dedicated to art and craft, in a city
built out of monumental social change, reinforces the sense that Brown’s creativity is engaged not only in his art
but in design, politics and society as well. On leaving the Gallery I looked up
again, respectfully, at the motto on the frieze. A little more knowledge had
been advanced in my direction and I felt inspired to play a small part in its
diffusion.
The sunlight
lasted into that evening, reflecting soft hues of deep, dusky pink from the
monumental, 19th century red brick buildings, bouncing back from the
20th century glass towers and soaking into the honey-coloured stone
of the classical-themed fantasies to display a tableau of urban development and
social change in one great, unstructured son
et lumiere. I thought about the inscribed pledge of honesty, prudence and
perseverance which proclaimed the values of the incumbent business of an earlier
age and compared it with modern-day, bland ‘mission statements’ about customer
satisfaction. I began to dream of persuading banks to resurrect the old values and
to post them proudly on their web-sites. But then I remembered one of the last
works in the exhibition: a portrait of St. Jude – the patron saint of hopeless
causes.
No comments:
Post a Comment