Fostering in the People the Purest Types of Beauty: Ford Madox Brown and Democratic Art Education

Abstract

This article explores Ford Madox Brown's contribution to art education in Britain. Brown adapted his own student experience of continental academies (Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp) to inform his practical tuition of artists in his studio at home and at independent artisanal schools, while responding to contemporary intellectual fashions to draft his Cambridge Slade Professorship application and public lectures. His misgivings about both the Royal Academy Schools and Government Schools of Design manifested itself in his desire to cultivate taste in all classes of Britons, and balance the commercial requirements of manufacturing industry with the learning needs of individuals in society.The contribution made by Ford Madox Brown to art education in Britain has received scant attention from historians. Brown entered into this field at a crucial time, for not only had the Select Committee of Arts and Manufactures (1835-6) resulted in the new Government Schools of Design (the first of which opened at Somerset House in 1837), but also the advent of illustrated art literature for a mass readership represented a new 'pictorial turn'. The demand for educating the working classes potentially promised 'a kind of democratic victory for aesthetics' in the early 1840s. 1 Victorians were mindful of the relationship between vision and learning, for, as P. G. Hamerton observed in the Art Journal in 1866, 'What men will see is determined beforehand by very complex conditions of faculties, experience, and education' and furthermore artistic education offered a special depth of knowledge for 'the difference between artistic sight and ordinary sight is occasioned by the fact that mankind generally do not look for those truths and qualities which artists look for'. 2 Working-class interest in educational self-improvement was fuelled by increased access to scientific and cultural texts as eighteenth-century workingmen's libraries were supplemented by Mechanics' Institutes and reading rooms from the 1820s, and public libraries from 1850. 3 While the social engagement of Brown's 'Victorian imagination' can be readily mapped in his artworks, his involvement with democratic developments in art education was an equally important aspect of his vision for an improved society. Brown's educational strategy will be reconstructed here from his classroom practices, his writings and lectures. These promoted liberal principles for art education in a tempered rather than radical Socialist manner, moderated with academic discipline and pragmatic concessions to the industrialized workplace and the receptiveness of the middle classes to reform. Downloaded by [McMaster University] at 07:57 03 February 2015Brown and the Academies Brown's ideas on education were inevitably conditioned by his own youthful experiences. Owing to his family's itinerant lifestyle, Brown received his art training in Belgium. His parents hired an Italian drawing-master who tasked Brown with copying prints, after which he enrolled at the Bruges Academy under Albert Gregorius (1835), th...