Ford Madox Brown (1821-1893)

細節
Ford Madox Brown (1821-1893)

Romeo and Juliet

signed with monogram and dated '68-71'; watercolour and bodycolour with gum arabic
12 5/8 x 9 5/8in. (321 x 245mm.)
來源
Sold in April 1871 to James Anderson Rose for 60 gns.
His sale; Christie's, 5 May 1891, lot 20 (16 gns. to Oman)
Anon sale; Sotheby's, 9 October 1946 (#88 to Brown and Phillips)
Sir Colin Anderson
出版
F.M. Hueffer, Ford Madox Brown, A Record of his Life and Work, 1896, pp. 243, 247, 262-3, 441 (list)
展覽
London, Leicester Galleries, The Victorian Romantics, 1949, no. 84
London, I.C.A., Ten Decades of British Taste, 1951, no. 30

拍品專文

Although King Lear was the Shakespeare play which had most significance for Brown, amounting almost to an obsession, Romeo and Juliet inspired one of his most dramatic later designs of which this is a small version. The first version was a watercolour of 1867 (Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester) commissioned by Frederick Craven, a Manchester businessman who collected works in this medium, buying extensively from Brown, Rossetti, Burne-Jones and others. A larger oil (Bancroft Collection, Wilmington) was started the same year and completed in 1870, the purchaser being another good patron of Brown's, the Newcastle industrailist James Leathart. There is also a monochrome version, dated 1876, in the Bradford City Art Gallery. The present watercolour was begun in 1868 and was 'sufficiently advanced' by September to be shown to the collector William Graham, who did not however buy it. We hear of it as 'finished' in February 1869, but Brown continued to work on it, probably giving it the final touches in May 1871. He considered it 'no less complete' than the larger (Whitworth) watercolour of 1869.

The design exemplifies the more sensuous and romantic style that Brown adopted in the 1860s under the influence of Rossetti. Brown's wife Emma posed for Juliet, somewhat inappropriately as she was now in her mid-thirties. The model for Romeo was Charles Augustus Howell, the handsome half-Portuguese adventurer who was initially welcomed by the Pre-Raphaelite circle for his willingness to further their interests, but ultimately became an object of suspicion and loathing.

The picture shows the scene on Juliet's balcony when the lovers part after their wedding night, Romeo to go into exile for the killing of Tybalt (Act III, Scene 5). Crying 'Farewell, farewell! one kiss, and I'll descend', he is already half over the parapet, one hand pointing to the approaching dawn against which the towers of Verona are sharply etched. 'You must expect a scene of passion', Brown told Craven. The background was based on photographs which he borrowed from Rossetti.

Perhaps not surprisingly in view of its emotional intensity, the design proved popular in France; indeed the French government began negotiations to buy the large oil version for the Luxembourg, only to find that it had already been sold in America. The composition helped to inspire Frank Dicksee's treatment of the same theme, conceived as an illustration to the play as published in Cassell's 'International Shakespeared', 1884, and re-cast as an oil painting (Southampton Art Gallery), exhibited at the Royal Academy the same year