The Infant Jason delivered to the Centaur

At the time of Oliver Madox Brown’s death Rossetti wrote to his father, the artist Ford Madox Brown: ‘Your son, with such a beginning, would probably – most probably – have proved the first imaginative writer of his time’ (O. Doughty and J.R. Wahl (eds.), Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Oxford, 1965-7, letter 1536). Known as ‘Nolly’ to his family and close friends, Madox Brown’s work was heavily influenced by his father’s. His talent showed itself early when he executed his first watercolour, Centaurs Hunting, at the age of eight. Another work, completed in 1866 when he was eleven, Queen Margaret and the Robbers is in the William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow. The present watercolour illustrates, with exact fidelity to detail, the episode in Morris’s The Life and Death of Jason (Book 7) in which the centaur Chiron receives the baby Jason from the slave. On 30 November 1868 his father wrote to George Rae: 'My son Nolly is hard at work on an infant Jason being delivered to the Centaur from Morris's book. This time it is a good sized watercolour and I think, will turn out very fine. He beats me in colour already, and I fancy, before many years he will beat me in other qualities also' (Hueffer, loc. cit.). The watercolour is offered with a first edition of works by Madox-Brown which were left unfinished at his death.