Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Images are beautiful bright and vivid. No notes or highlighting. Very very slight tan to page edges. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> HIS WORK STARTLES ONE into the belief that we have in him an artist of singular truth soundness and originality; while so strong is the evidence of intellectual insight at once into the spirit of the past and of our own day and of vividness in the dramatic exhibition of character that we must henceforth assign him one of the leading places among our very small but honoured company of genuine historical painters. Thus the contemporary critic Palgrave writing of Ford Madox Brown’s 1865 retrospective where Work formed the centrepiece. A hundred and twenty-five years on the artist remains relatively unknown although Mary Bennett’s 1964 exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery Liverpool brought together many important works and the Tate Gallery’s The Pre-Raphaelites (1984) where Brown appeared alongside his famous contemporaries Millais Hunt and Rossetti confirmed Palgrave’s judgement. We believe that the time is ripe for a new assessment of this great original the most underrated figure in British art of the nineteenth century. His range was wide. Work and The Last of England were the contemporary face of a large body of imaginative painting beginning in the 1840s with Chaucer at the Court of Edward III and ending with the Manchester Town Hall murals of 1878-93. A realist Brown gave almost as much value to the landscape setting of his dramas as to the figures: as a landscape painter in his own right he rejected the picturesque finding poetry in the very ‘ordinariness’ of the workaday countryside. (MP)