Ford Madox Brown

This book argues that Ford Madox Browns murals in the Great Hall of Manchester Town Hall (187893) were the most important public art works of their day. Browns 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 Browns 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.

Colin Trodd is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of Manchester

Introduction
PART I: A WORKING LIFE
1 Ford Madox Brown and the historical imagination
2 The makingof Ford Madox Brown
PART II: HISTORY EMBODIED
3 Manchester, mythos, murals
4 The endless periphery
5 Manchester made modern
Afterword: the last of Ford Madox Brown
Index