Moses and the Brazen Serpent

Although Ford Madox Brown never became a formal member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, he gave lessons to Rossetti in 1848, the year of its founding, and by the 1850s was increasingly influenced by William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais’s use of intense colouring and realism. Despite not being a member of the group, he remained heavily involved with them, organising Pre-Raphaelite exhibitions in the late 1850s. In 1858 he founded the Hogarth Club, intended to be an exhibiting forum as an alternative to the Royal Academy, inspired by its namesake’s independence and commitment to the depiction of modern life. Rossetti was also a key figure in the club, and it was through him that Brown first met two of his young followers, Edward Burne-Jones, and William Morris.
Morris immediately purchased Brown’s The Hayfield (Tate, London), significant given Brown’s lack of commercial success at this point. In 1860 Brown resigned from the Hogarth Club when the hanging committee refused to include his furniture designs in the annual exhibition. Pre-empting the Aesthetic movement of the later 1860s, led by Morris, Brown was already moving towards greater integration of the fine and decorative arts. Brown and Morris’s interests aligned closely, and when Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co was founded in 1861, Brown became a partner, contributing designs for furniture, and also around 130 designs for stained glass. He always retained copyright of his stained glass designs, and often re-used the compositions for paintings. They were often technically challenging, if not impossible, for the glass makers.
Madox Brown had only designed one stained glass window prior to working with Morris, and he felt that what was needed was ‘invention, expression and good dramatic action’. He worked on several windows in collaboration with Burne-Jones, each designing individual panels, including Meole Brace, Shropshire, and Jesus College Chapel, Cambridge, as well as the group for which this design was destined, at Haltwhistle, Northumberland. Moses and the Brazen Serpent was to sit alongside Isaac carrying wood and Christ bearing his cross in small panels below Burne-Jones’s larger designs of Christ on the Cross and The Virgin and St John.
Many of Madox Brown’s cartoons for windows have not survived: they were working drawings made for the glass makers to follow. This one is remarkably well preserved, and shows us something of the way in which Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. used artists to design decorative arts.
This drawing was previously in the collection of the artist L.S. Lowry, who, contrary to his usual Pre-Raphaelite collecting habits, focused on images of beautiful women, owned it because he admired the grimness of its subject.