In his more prosperous days in Fitzrovia Ford Madox Brown, the painter of
“Work” and “The Last of England” (voted one of Britain’s ten favourite
pictures in a BBC Radio 4 poll in 2005), threw brilliant parties, hosted
animated debates and even fashionable séances. On one such occasion, James
McNeill Whistler, one of Madox Brown’s guests, met “the most wonderful
people, Swinburne, anarchists, poets, and musicians, all kinds and sorts,
and in an inner room Rossetti and Mrs Morris sitting side by side in state,
being worshipped”. Admirers thought Madox Brown the handsomest man in London
and the best conversationalist. Though he was never formally a member of the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, his art had been so closely associated with
theirs that he was sometimes called King of the Pre-Raphaelites. During his
party days he was known as a King of Hearts. The most masculine of men, his
life was shaped by the sympathy – and complexities – of four women central
to it: his two secret loves, the artist Marie Spartali and the author
Mathilde Blind, and his two wives and models, Elisabeth Bromley and Emma
Hill. All of them exploded any conventional notions about the artist’s
silent muse. In a sense, with their distinct talents and opinions, they
represented a route towards modernity that made a piquant impact on Madox
Brown’s whole oeuvre, from intense private pictures to spectacular public
art. He kept his beard and hair long, and his second wife Emma cut it blunt
and square so that he looked like the playing card king. But as he aged, he
cultivated a King Lear-like appearance. Shakespeare’s tragedy had engaged
him throughout his career: as a young man in Paris in the 1840s he made a
series of powerful drawings to illustrate it. He loved the stage, especially
Shakespeare, and blocked his pictures with the instincts of a theatre
director.
One day, two years after the death of his first wife in 1846, “a girl as loves
me came in and disturbed me”. With un-Victorian directness Emma Hill simply
walked into Madox Brown’s life – and his art. There was a recurrence of the
artist’s involvement with King Lear when he made his first extant portrait
of Emma, a delicate profile head, dated Christmas 1848, a preliminary study
for his painting “Cordelia at the Bedside of Lear”. With its ideal
regularity, Emma’s face could become a princess’s but also represent
Everywoman – as the emigrant wife in “The Last of England”. Emma was no
longer the uneducated girl she had been when she and Madox Brown first met.
But she could never match the intellectual rapport that Mathilde Blind,
another of their party guests, could offer him.
Mathilde Blind, née Cohen, a young German-Jewish writer, committed feminist
and agnostic, published her Poems in 1867, under the androgynous pseudonym
of Claude Lake. She arrived in England, aged eleven, in 1852 as an asylum
seeker, along with her mother, Friederike Cohen, and her (Protestant)
stepfather, Karl Blind, a leader of German revolution in 1848. The Blinds’
home near Swiss Cottage became a focus for Continental exiles. Marx had been
an early associate, Mazzini a frequent visitor and Mathilde’s special hero.
In 1866, Mathilde’s brother, Ferdinand, shot but failed to assassinate
Bismarck, killing himself in despair at the police station. Mathilde came
from an unconventional European background of rational freethinking and
practical action. She had radical credentials.
Her education had been an academically distinguished one, in Germany, Belgium
and England. But it was her passion for Shelley which linked her to
Pre-Raphaelite circles in bohemian London. After losing his beloved art
student, Marie Spartali, to marriage in 1871, Madox Brown lamented that
“everyone was somewhere else”. Within weeks he chose Lynmouth, the Devon
resort with Shelleyan connections, for his summer holiday and invited
Mathilde to join the family. Petite, dark and intense in vivid striped
silks, Mathilde whirled in on them with a storm of talk and German argument,
driven by a literary quest. She tracked down an old woman, Mary Blackmore,
who remembered Shelley. “I am going to draw her”, wrote Madox Brown, and
“Miss Blind is to make an article about her.” Artist and poet were drawn
together in the excitement of a shared project.
In her late twenties, twelve years younger than Brown’s corn-blonde wife Emma,
and twenty years junior to the artist, Mathilde was mesmerizing. For Richard
Garnett, superintendent of the British Museum Reading Room, she was “one of
the most magnetic young women in London” and he fell in love with her.
Joaquin Miller, an American poet and adventurer, proposed to her, and it was
rumoured that even Swinburne might marry her. Mathilde had many friends and
admirers – of both sexes – but she gravitated towards married men: Garnett,
William Michael Rossetti, and, most enduringly and passionately, Ford Madox
Brown. From now on, she lived intermittently but persistently in the Madox
Browns’ London home.
In September 1877, Manchester’s new Town Hall, designed by Alfred Waterhouse,
received its ceremonial opening. However, it lacked the historical murals
envisaged by the architect for its Great Hall. The councillors were nervous
about appointing Madox Brown, whose paintings were simply “too outré” for
them. A Manchester city councillor, Charles Rowley, explained that his art
was “not pitched in a key popular enough for most of us but I think we could
get him to compromise a little in that line”. Compromise was not an element
in Madox Brown’s personality, but by 1878 mediation brought him the
commission. He and Emma moved to Manchester in 1880 – where Mathilde soon
joined them. The ménage à trois was no more tenable in the North than it had
proved to be in London, so Mathilde moved out to nearby lodgings. This was a
pattern repeated, with variations, throughout their friendship.
As the Madox Browns and Mathilde tried to acclimatize to “cold &
boisterous” Manchester, they all teetered on the tightrope of their awkward
threesome. Mathilde and Madox Brown were recovering from overwork and ill
health. Emma was often unwell. The painter was working punishing days at
Manchester Town Hall, “10 a.m. to 10 p.m. & 7 days per week –
consequently no dinner, or little trips to friends”. At the same time,
Mathilde was reading Shelley and Darwin, and researching for her biographies
of George Eliot and Madame Roland, “transgressive” female subjects who
reflected her personal philosophy. In a similar way, although the murals
were, on the face of it, a visual history for the people of Manchester to
read, a modern equivalent to the Bayeux Tapestry, they provided an
opportunity for the artist to embed his own values in them.
One of the most dramatic panels was “The Trial of Wycliffe”. Madox Brown, by
now a confirmed agnostic, if not an atheist, nevertheless recognized the
power of religious subjects in art. The Nonconformist figure of Wycliffe
sorted well with the post-Darwinian, secular philosophy Madox Brown shared
with Mathilde. Her poem “The Prophecy of St. Oran” was so shocking in its
challenge to conventional Christianity that the publisher, Newman and Co,
took fright and withdrew it from circulation because of its “atheistic
character”. Oran was one of Columba’s most devoted monks but “his pulses
thrilled” with love for Mona, a beautiful pagan. He tries to convert her to
Christianity but she simply cannot understand “his joy-killing creed”, nor
fathom “of what she should repent”. Oran fights to keep faith with chastity,
until neither he nor Mona can restrain their love:
What boots it thus to struggle with his sin,
So much more sweet than all his virtues were?
Like a great flood let all her love roll in
And his soul stifle mid her golden hair!
And so he barters his eternal bliss
For the divine delirium of her kiss!
As they labour to build God’s holy house on Iona, Columba’s monks are thwarted
by violent storms, and local people revert to their pagan gods. Suspecting a
curse on their work, Columba asks “what man among you all / Living in deadly
sin, yet wears the mask / Of sanctity?”. Oran denies his sin but is flushed
out by the arrival of Mona, like the ghost of a Druid princess, wildly
searching for her lover. Columba sentences Oran to be buried alive. Three
days later, Oran’s bloodless face breaks out of the clay and speaks: “Lo, I
come back from the grave, – / Behold, there is no God to smite or save”. He
reports there is no devil, no heaven, no hell. Instead, he tells them, “Ye
can have Eden here! . . . Cast down the crucifix, take up the plough!”.
There is indeed a God: “that God is Love”, the “tender human tie” that Oran
knows with Mona. Although Columba orders his instant re-burial, Oran’s voice
is stronger and reverberates after the grave is shut and the poem ended.
Mathilde’s extraordinary poem could be read as a blasphemous reworking of the
Resurrection or as an expression of nineteenth-century humanism. Madox
Brown’s Wycliffe and Mathilde Blind’s Oran were both modernizing voices.
Their bodies could be buried alive or burned – as Wycliffe’s was after his
death – but they could not be silenced.
Artist and poet also shared democratic principles. Madox Brown’s long
identification with Oliver Cromwell was still apparent, after earlier works
depicting Cromwell, in the final mural he made for Manchester, “Bradshaw’s
Defence of Manchester”. It was a heroic subject, heroically undertaken after
his painting hand was paralysed by a stroke, in honour of his Cromwellian
principles. Mathilde, too, championed democratic rights, particularly those
of uprooted Highland crofters in her protest poem “The Heather on Fire”.
By August 1882, Mathilde was exhausted. She had just finished her biography of
George Eliot. In the author, who also lived in an irregular union with a
married man, Mathilde found a modern, literary heroine with special
relevance to her own relationship with Madox Brown and their erratic ménage.
But biography was not Mathilde’s natural genre. It had been hard labour to
corral facts in “luminous arrangement”. At last she felt she could lay down
her pen, “go out and actually stay out as long as ever I liked”. Perhaps her
independent wandering over the hills was partly the cause of a serious
“tiff” between her and Madox Brown. For in spite of uplifting views from
their holiday cottage at Chapel-en-le-Frith in Derbyshire, it was here that
Mathilde and Madox Brown had a cantankerous falling-out.
They walked out on each other in turn, and the breach was still not healed by
September when the Madox Browns returned to Manchester. The artist attempted
to appease Mathilde’s “soreness” by letter but Mathilde did not relent.
“Stiff and unyielding”, she regarded “their intimate friendship as at an
end”. William Rossetti found the stand-off “certainly very ungrateful and
foolish on Mathilde’s part, as Brown has for some years past made her
practically a member of his family, housing and supporting her”. What sort
of family role did William, or other observers, consider Mathilde played in
relation to Madox Brown? Two years senior to his eldest child, was she an
“adopted” extra daughter, resented by Lucy and Cathy? Or was she a live-in
competitor to Emma, a mistress in the head if not in the bed? It seems
probable that she slipped between both roles at different times. The
intensity of the row between Mathilde and Madox Brown betrayed the
complexity of their emotional relationship.
Mathilde seized an opportunity to mend the quarrel some months later when
Madox Brown fell seriously ill and, though warily and not immediately, she
took the train to be at his side. But this time she stayed outside the
family home. The artist recovered slowly, reporting that Emma and Mathilde
“keep well on the whole”. They had established a domestic truce and a
diurnal rhythm. “Mathilde works in her lodgings all the early part of the
day and walks here usually by 4 or 5 and then reads us what she may have
done – or else poetry of some kind and we chat”.
After the virtual completion of the Manchester murals and Emma’s death in
1890, Madox Brown was again living in London, with Mathilde close by.
Contemporary speculation murmured that the two planned to marry – or had
already married. In these years Madox Brown’s mind was brought back to
Shakespeare when Henry Irving commissioned him to design three majestic sets
for his King Lear in 1892. Irving’s Lear and Ellen Terry’s Cordelia wore the
same combination of “Roman-pagan-British” costumes that Madox Brown had
shown in his earlier Lear pictures. Reviewers found the settings “gorgeous
throughout”. Mathilde saw the production and told Irving how
“extraordinarily moved” she had been by his performance.
On Sunday October 1, 1893, Ford Madox Brown worked for an hour or two on his
replica of the Wycliffe cartoon. He felt inexplicably tired. As Cathy
Hueffer, his widowed younger daughter, helped him upstairs to bed, he said
to her, “Well, my dear, my work’s done now”. On Monday he stayed in bed, at
his home hung with golden wallpaper at 1 St Edmund’s Terrace, adjacent to
Primrose Hill, in north London. Later Lucy Rossetti, his eldest daughter,
visited for a painful farewell – wasted by tuberculosis, she was leaving the
next day to winter in Italy. At this point, either Cathy or her son, the
young Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford), decided to summon Mathilde back from her
writing holiday at Wendover with Mona Caird. Lucy was implacably opposed to
Mathilde’s liaison with her father and no one wanted to take the risk of the
two women colliding on the stairs. However, Cathy was less intransigent than
her half-sister on the subject of Mathilde. Although his talent was for
fiction rather than biography, Ford Madox Ford later maintained that his
grandfather’s “last quite coherent words” were spoken either to Lucy on the
eve of her departure, or to Mathilde “whilst advising some alterations” to
her work in progress. Madox Brown’s partisanship of Mathilde’s work had
always fuelled their relationship. “He listened with his usual vivid
sympathy”, she said, “to some poems I had lately written” (while on holiday
with Mona Caird). Mathilde’s love poems were partly disguised autobiography,
and fused her tumultuous feelings for various people and places.
No one wanted to believe the artist was on his deathbed: they were planning
for the future. “At his express wish”, Mathilde “went to Tunbridge Wells”,
one of her favourite health retreats, “to look for rooms for himself, Mrs.
Hueffer, and her daughter [Juliet]. The idea of going there seemed to please
him greatly”. However, on Tuesday, Madox Brown suffered an attack of
apoplexy (stroke or cerebral event) and remained comatose for three days.
Cathy called in Dr Gill of Russell Square and Dr Roberts of Harley Street.
On the morning of Friday October 6, the seventy-two-year-old artist regained
consciousness briefly, had breakfast, relapsed into a coma and died at 4.30
pm. Mathilde went into mourning, alone, in Tunbridge Wells, at one of the
dozens of lodgings she used throughout her peripatetic life.
The funeral took place in the unconsecrated part of St Pancras Cemetery at
East Finchley five days later. Many members of the family, friends and
representatives from Manchester Corporation convened at the graveside. The
Daily Graphic reported the unusual procedure. “As soon as the mourners had
gathered round under the shadow of a fine sycamore, of which the leaves have
just faded into a beautiful golden brown, the coffin was lowered.” Then
Moncure Conway, the American freethinker in whose honour Conway Hall in
London was later named, delivered a moving and entirely secular address.
Many newspapers described Mathilde Blind’s beautiful foliage wreath with a
“line from Blake woven in gold on a ribbon of black silk: – ‘Death is the
mercy of eternity’”. In fact, Mathilde had deliberately revised Blake’s
gnomic words from Milton. The original line reads “Time is the mercy of
eternity”. Mathilde’s reworking, while still ambiguous, presumably hints at
the agnosticism she shared with the artist. Neither Mathilde nor Madox Brown
envisaged an afterlife. In a curious slip, several newspapers reported
Mathilde’s name incorrectly and called her “Mathilde Brown”.
Today Madox Brown’s grave is hidden from view in a remote section of the
cemetery. A few steps away, in a more accessible position, stands an elegant
monument to Mathilde Blind in Carrara marble carved by Edouard Lanteri. It
shows Mathilde as a classical goddess, presiding over two graceful female
figures, Philosophy and Poetry. Cut beneath her name is the same line she
had chosen for Madox Brown’s wreath – DEATH IS THE MERCY OF ETERNITY.
Mathilde’s own summation of her nomadic life can be found in her unpublished
Commonplace Book, in the Bodleian Library. “I have been an exile in this
world. Without a God, without a country, without a family.” This was the
force that impelled the passionate attachments of her life. Her liaison with
Madox Brown had been her most meaningful, sustained relationship. “The death
of a friend is a grievous affliction but the death of a friendship ‘works
like madness in the brain’”, she thought. “Dear Mathilde”, wrote Richard
Garnett, “I can very well enter into the sorrow you so touchingly express in
your letter, knowing what an incomparable friend you have lost in Madox
Brown, and how much you have mutually been to each other.” When he published
his Memoir of Mathilde, Garnett tactfully categorized Mr and Mrs Ford Madox
Brown “above all” in a list of her intimate friends. But in careful code he
gestured towards the relationship between Mathilde and the painter as
“singularly beautiful”.
Ford Madox Brown: The Unofficial Pre-Raphaelite, an exhibition of the artist’s
little known works on paper, is at Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery until
December 14.
Angela Thirlwell is the author of William and Lucy: The other
Rossettis, 2003. She is writing a book about Ford Madox Brown and the women
in his art and life.
