Ford Maddox brown - The Last of England

Having just completed an article, published elsewhere, on a Max Beckmann painting whose theme was an allegorical vision of a journey, and following the critical discourse that accompanied the recent release of the Christopher Nolan-directed film The Odyssey, an adaptation of Homer’s classic about an archetypal epic expedition, our minds were swirling with what journeys mean to us. So, it was maybe not surprising that we felt prompted to take one more look at another depiction of travelling that we see in Ford Maddox Brown’s The Last of England, the jewel in the crown of Birmingham Art Gallery’s pre-Raphaelite collection. This is a work we have admired on many of our numerous visits there and which deals with an embarkation, a passage, but which feels even more modish to us in today’s context than it might have done previously. Any journey, be it a holiday, a tour, a pilgrimage, a relocation, a quest or an exile, voluntary or enforced, inevitably summons conflicted feelings. These might include excitement, hope, anxiety, expectation, trepidation and sometimes dread – fearfulness of the jeopardy that inheres travel and worry about the threat of dispossession and privation that it can entail. This painting succeeds in communicating some of these emotions as its two central figures stare out over the viewer’s shoulder towards a horizon beyond which lies much that is unknown and unknowable.

This is a Victorian narrative painting relating a familiar experience in its period. It shows a husband, wife and child setting out for Australia where they will make a fresh start and reinvent themselves. This will be a journey of 100 days or more, depending on the weather, a voyage that was made by hundreds of thousands each year in the 1850s. It is ‘the last of England’ in the sense that the white cliffs in the background may well be the final picture they have of their native country but the title is also a reference to a jaundiced and commonly held view of Britain, that it offered few prospects, that it was washed up, that there were better places to live one’s life. The sense is almost ‘good riddance to the last of England’. The country remained class-bound, whereas the emerging Antipodean cities enjoyed refreshing social mobility. The new land had vast mineral wealth and there was money to be made there it seemed, but it also retained, convict population notwithstanding, a respectability with which the English-born would feel at home. In other words, it was both like England but also unlike it enough to be seductive. These intrepid travellers are bidding goodbye, they hope, to their previous struggles.

The name of the ship, as painted on the life raft, is El Dorado. The pair have set off in search of their own ‘city of gold’. They are leaving behind a place where metaphorical gold for them is hard to come by, but the artist may have signalled by the use of the vessel name, a belief that they have been deluded, that the supposed riches down under will prove as illusory as the eponymous and mythical South American city. This remained a hazardous voyage at the time (ships could and did sink) and the inclusion of the name on a life saving vessel is also another little hint that ‘the best-laid schemes’ do not always work out and that the passengers could count themselves lucky if they didn’t need to rely on the even more precarious rescue boat. Their journey would be gruelling, and they risked not just storms, but deadly disease on board too.

It is well-known that Maddox Brown was inspired to make the painting after the emigration of his friend, the sculptor Thomas Woolner but that the couple are painted with the likenesses of the artist and his second wife, Emma and this substitution indicates something about their relationship. Both are shown wrapped up against the very blustery weather, a meteorological downside to life in the British Isles that they would have been glad to escape. A string tethers the man’s hat to a coat button, to guard against its gale swept loss. Its upturned brim reveals his deeply furrowed brow. Is he concerned that they won’t even make it out of the Channel in these conditions, let alone reach the other side of the world? His stare though is implacable, his tiny mouth set firm. He holds his hand inside his coat, Napoleon style, a conventional gesture in portraiture to convey just the right mixture of manliness and modesty.  But here his wife holds his right hand as much as he holds hers, as if she is reassuring him rather than vice versa. The hand clasp is positioned above a pile of what look like note or sketchbooks that the couple are bringing with them as if what they think will sustain them is not so much strength and courage but imagination. Is Maddox Brown gesturing at some of his own insecurities in the painting by using his own likeness for a figure so seemingly dependent? Poignantly, the man’s hand simultaneously touches not just his wife’s but also the red-socked foot of the child sheltering under her cape and whose tiny-fingered hand she holds in her own left one, visible through her cloak’s opening. All these hands saying so much!

The wind blows strongly right to left so that the magenta silk ribbon of her bonnet flaps in front of him. Although he holds tight to the umbrella shaft, the pink material flies from her chin and has become phallus shaped. It emerges not from him to her but the other way round as it encroaches into his space. Could this be another mark of his feminisation if not his emasculation? Furthermore, we can see another woman’s bonnet and face immediately behind his head, a positioning which adds dubiety to his own sexuality. The wife’s mouth is also set tight, but her gaze is more open. She seems lost in thought, her eyes wide as perhaps she daydreams about the life ahead. She is definitely the calmer of the pair, more accepting of the tribulations that the journey and the new life will throw at them. Hers is a face which is haloed by the concentric roundels of her hair, hat and hood, shapes which find an outer echo in the ‘tondo’ format of the painting itself. She looks like a Renaissance Madonna, a blue-eyed protectress, an intercessor in crisis, her maternal mantle here is the homespun shepherd’s check cape whose soft protective folds, so artfully painted by Maddox Brown, give sanctuary to her precious child whose head shape can be read pressing outwards from beneath. I love the meticulous details, including the cape’s fringe and the salty water droplets on the outer skin of the umbrella which then pools onto the gunwale.

Cabbages are shown strung from the netting and rope rail. On the long journey these are intended to supplement whatever food stores were kept below deck, so this is a realistic inclusion that the artist records documentary-style in the composition. But I also suspect that they are added to the narrative in a slightly mocking way here. The very cheap and humble vegetables might be a source of sustenance and vitamins, but they would hardly be the foodstuff choice of the privileged. Is Maddox Brown again suggesting that the adventure which promised so much might not be all that it is cracked up to be? The cabbages, like the presence of the drunken rough types we see in the background, are indicative of the equality of misery that awaits the benighted family.