12 colour illustrations, 14 black & white illustrations
Publishing Details
Publisher
Manchester University Press
Imprint
Manchester University Press
Publication Date
19 July 2022
Publication Country
United Kingdom
Description
Ford Madox Brown, the Manchester murals and the matter of history 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.
Author Biography
Colin Trodd is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of Manchester -- .