Ford Madox Brown: The Manchester Murals and the Matter of History

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.
This original book explores the thinking behind Brown’s murals in Manchester Town Hall. It argues that Brown was the most innovative artist in Victorian Britain and that he used this public commission to contest the liberal model of British history favoured by the Manchester Corporation.