Curatorial Space

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For 6 of the 15 years it took to complete the commission, Brown lived in Manchester, including on Daisy Bank Road, Victoria Park. During this time he met and mingled with many illustrious Mancunians. In terms of Brown’s flagging career, one of the most important of these acquaintances was the famous Brewer, Henry Boddington. Boddington acquired over 30 of Brown’s paintings and housed these in his picture gallery at Pownall Hall, Wilmslow (now a private school). 

It is thanks to Boddington and Brown’s other Manchester supporters such as Charles Rowley (frame maker) and C P Scott (editor of The Manchester Guardian), that Manchester Art Gallery now has such a significant collection of Brown’s paintings. Amongst the 44 works by Brown owned by the Gallery are 3 of his designs for the Manchester murals. My favourite is John Kay, inventor of the Fly Shuttle, AD 1753 which shows the inventor Kay being bundled into a sheet by his family in order to escape the machine breakers coming in at the window. Henry Boddington’s wife and children modelled for Mrs Kay and her children – perhaps a good way to keep on the right side of your patron, immortalising his family on the walls of the Town Hall!

Rebecca Milner
Curator: Collections Access

Book tickets
** The event is now sold out **

Tickets cost £10 and booking is essential.
The Manchester Town Hall murals are open to the public especially to coincide with Ford Madox Brown: Pre-Raphaelite Pioneer. Public access will be available from 10am – 5pm on the following Sundays in January:
15 January, 22 January, 29 January
There is no admission charge to visit the Great Hall.

Images
Unfinished cartoon/design for John Kay, Inventor of the fly shuttle, AD 1753, 1888, tempera on panel. ©Manchester City Art Galleries
Design for Crabtree watching the transit of Venus, AD 1639, 1881, 1888, tempera on panel.  ©Manchester City Art Galleries
Design for The Establishment of the Flemish weavers in Manchester, AD 1362, 1881, 1888, tempera on panel. ©Manchester City Art Galleries
 

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Pre-Raphaelite artists were often intimately involved with their models and Ford Madox Brown was no exception. In December 1848 he met Emma Hill, a bricklayer’s daughter, who was working as a model. They quickly fell in love, had a daughter and married in 1853. Unlike the dark and red haired women that Rossetti, Hunt and Millais fell for, Emma was fair. William Michael Rossetti (later Brown and Emma’s son-in-law) described her looks: ‘pink complexion, regular features and a fine abundance of beautiful yellow hair, the tint of harvest corn’.  

Model, muse and wife, Emma was the woman that Brown most frequently turned to for the principal female characters in his work. She appears in Brown’s art as literary heroines, historical queens and escorts, but most memorably as the modern woman aboard an emigrants’ ship, lost in thought, perhaps hopeful yet reticent about the future alongside her brooding, disappointed husband. Emma posed outside in the winter to enable Brown to capture the effect of a cold, dull winter’s day on her face, and the wind catching the ribbons of her bonnet. It took him 4 weeks to paint the ribbons alone! I’m not sure how Emma felt about this, but she seems to have agreed to some gruelling sittings in all sorts of weathers to help Brown fulfil his ‘truth to nature’ approach.

The other famous painting by Brown where Emma appears is Manchester Art Gallery’s Work. In the exhibition we have included a beautiful pencil study of Emma for the lady with the parasol, which comes from the Walker Art Gallery’s collection in Liverpool.  

Angela Thirlwell who has contributed to the Ford Madox Brown exhibition catalogue will be revealing more about Emma and 3 other women in Brown’s life at a talk - Ford Madox Brown: Life, Love, Art - on 19^th November. Angela’s research helps us gain a broader understanding of Brown’s art as well as the complex role women played within the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

Visit Manchester Art Gallery's website for more information about Angela’s talk or buy tickets online here.

Rebecca Milner
Curator: Collections Access

Images:
1. Detail of Emma from The Last of England, 1852-55, ©Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery
2. Emma Hill (Study for ‘King Lear’), 1848, ©Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery
3. Work, 1852-63, ©Manchester City Art Galleries

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A Manchester Street (image 1) was purchased by the gallery in 2008, and since that time we have been on the lookout for an opportunity to display it. The Manchester Gallery seemed the obvious place, but it wasn’t until last week that space became available.

The artist, John Bold (1895 - 1979), was born in the Moss Side area of Manchester. He attended the Manchester School of Art, becoming proficient at figure drawing - we have a chalk drawing of a charismatic ‘Italian head’ by him in the gallery’s collection. But what’s weird is that in his landscape work, for which he was best known, he almost entirely eliminates figures. His paintings have a bleak poetry about them that fascinates me.

I am not the only one drawn to Bold’s work. Mr Allcroft, the previous owner of A Manchester Street, purchased the painting directly from the artist in 1977, captivated by its simplicity. It evoked his own wartime childhood, spent in Gorton, Manchester. When the sirens sounded during the bombing raids over Manchester, he and his Mum would have to rush out to a shelter. He said, ‘My Dad thought we were sitting ducks with heavy industry all round us.’

Tom Allcroft was only five years old in 1941, but he remembers it vividly (image 2). He helped with the war effort by patrolling the street – not having a toy sword, he armed himself with his toy saw, and his toy gun. He hopes that when others see this picture of Manchester lit up by incendiary bombs they will reflect on what it must have been like during the early war years, and agree with Winston Churchill that ‘it is better to jaw, jaw than war, war’.

Hannah Williamson
Curator: Collections Access

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Images
1 A Manchester Street, 1941, by John Bold © Manchester City Galleries
2 Tom Allcroft aged 5, on patrol. Note the ‘V’ for victory, daubed on the wall behind him. With thanks to Mr Tom Allcroft.

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New on display in the 2nd floor Gallery of Craft & Design is Katie Walker's Ribbon Rocking Chair. Combining innovative design with traditional hand crafting, this chair has won awards from Channel 4's Grand Designs Product of the Year to the Wood Awards to the Guild Mark of the Worshipful Company of Furniture Makers.

Manchester Art Gallery is the only UK public collection to have this limited edition chair, with help from the generous support of The Art Fund and the MLA/V&A Purchase Grant Scheme.

For more information about Katie Walker's work please visit www.katiewalkerfurniture.com

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This week the painters were in! On Tuesday Danny and his team started priming the walls in the exhibition spaces ready for the lovely Farrow & Ball colours that will provide the backdrop to Ford Madox Brown’s work. We’ve chosen Green Smoke, Picture Gallery Red and Brassica from F&B’s vast range of historic and contemporary colours. Green Smoke was apparently a popular colour in the second half of the 19^th Century and we felt it reflected Brown’s interest in the more muted tones of the Aesthetic Movement later in his career.

It’s very exciting to see the space being prepared. Next week we’ll start hanging some of the works and it will really start to take shape. Another key development this week was the arrival of advanced copies of the exhibition catalogue. It looks great with all its colour illustrations of the works in the show.

I’m busy proofing exhibition text and finalising lots of other details. For the audio guide recording last week I asked Julian what work he would like to hang on his walls if he could. I won’t reveal what that is just yet, but it got me thinking about which one I’d like. For me it would have to be one of his small jewel like landscapes such as Carrying Corn.  This is beautiful and intense and came as a real surprise to me when I saw it as I hadn’t realised the extent of Brown’s interest in landscape. He went to the same spot 20 times to complete this painting and struggled with the changes in weather each time as he wanted to capture it as he’d first seen it on a sun-lit day. These struggles are not evident in the painting and the clarity of light and colour are what I love. Did Van Gogh ever see this I wonder?

Rebecca Milner, Curator: Collections Access

Images
The painters, Danny and his team get to work in the exhibition galleries, ©Manchester City Galleries
Ford Madox Brown, Carrying Corn, 1854, oil on panel, Tate, ©Tate, London 2010

We have just put up a new display by Rachel Goodyear. We are showing four framed drawings and her first animation. Rachel makes drawings of macabre scenes featuring people and animals. She is inspired by different sources including folklore, mythology and personal experience. In one image we see emerging from a girl’s mouth a snake which turns into a frog at its head. In another image entitled Headache a man with vacant eyes has thorny sticks taped to his head. The work shows a strange connection between humans and nature – one which is mutually dependent, yet sinister. There is a fine line between humour and malevolence. In the animation Kissing in Tunnels her disturbing characters come alive, locked in an eternal loop of waiting, longing and resignation.

The artist is a young, highly successful Manchester-based artist who exhibits her work internationally and is represented by two galleries who sell her work to collectors worldwide. We are showing Rachel’s work in a section called Making It in The Manchester Gallery in which we highlight artists and makers based in the city whose careers are taking off.

Personally I am very excited to finally be showing Rachel’s work as I have admired it for a long time and followed her career with interest. This display will be on show for a year.

Natash Howes
Curator: Exhibitions

Image credit: Sliding up 2009, courtesy the artist and The International 3

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Welcome to the future of ceramics!

Michael Eden's stunning Wedgwoodn't Tureen  now on display in  the Showcase in the Gallery of Craft & Design is the  result of the maker's quest to make challenging new ceramic shapes. Frustrated by the limitations arising from traditional techniques he set out to make radical redesigns of Wedgwood forms that simply could not be made by established techniques. Using the latest digital manufacturing techniques enabled him to create extraordinary pierced designs. Eden worked as a craft potter for 20 years and brings together cutting edge digital fabrication technologies with his extensive first hand knowledge of ceramics.

I've displayed Eden's work alongside Wedgwood pots from our collection that are like the ones that inspired him. Wedgwood was a pioneer of the industrial revolution, and an enthusiast for the latest technologies of his day.  

The display will soon be accompanied by a video interview with Michael Eden explaining how his work is made. You can find out more about Michael Eden's practice on his blog The Hand And The Glove.

I would like to offer special thanks to Alison Copeland who first brought Michael Eden's work to my attention and to Phillippa Wood for her help with organising loans from the Shipley Art Gallery, Gateshead and from the artist.

Janet Boston
Curator: Collections Access

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During the Second World War Manchester Art Gallery's pioneering director, Lawrence Haward initiated a scheme to encourage local industries engaged in the war effort to commission artists. These artists recorded war work in Manchester's factories for posterity. Sixteen companies were persuaded to commission fifteen artists to make war paintings which were exhibited at Manchester Art Gallery at the end of the war. Since then many of these pictures have lain forgotten in our stores but we are bringing out three of them for display in the Modern and Contemporary gallery over the next two weeks. They will also be featured in a BBC1 programme on the North West's Hidden Paintings to be broadcast on Sunday 26 June at 10.25pm and presented by actor, Paul McGann.

The pictures we have had conserved and reframed ready for display are: Charles Cundall's Avro Lancaster Bombers at Woodford; A.S.Finlayson's Multi-spindle Drilling Machines on Aero-Engine Work which depicts workers on a production line making engines at Ford, and Keith Henderson's Loading Gantry for Pluto which shows the giant gantry of cable-makers W.T. Glover and Co. which was used for spooling onto drums the secret undersea cables which were laid across the Channel to provide fuel to British and Allied forces in France. Pluto stands for Pipeline Under the Ocean.

Hidden Paintings of the North West will also feature paintings at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool by the talented artist, Albert Richards who was killed in the war.

BBC your Paintings website
These largely forgotten paintings came to light again during work to prepare for the BBC and Public Catalogue Foundation website Your Paintings which launches this week. Your Paintings will bring together for the first time over 200,000 paintings held in public collections in the UK:

'Your Paintings will bring together all these artworks, with the stories behind them, and where to see them for real. Whether you’re a student, history buff, art lover or just interested in discovering the UK’s hidden treasures, for the first time you will finally see the incredible art that is owned by the Nation – Your Paintings.'

Tim Wilcox
Principal Manager: Exhibitions

Images:

1. Loading Gantry for Pluto , 1945, oil on canvas, Keith Henderson (1883-1982)
2. Avro Lancaster Bombers at Woodford, 1944, oil on canvas, Charles Cundall (1821-1893)
3. Multi-spindle Drilling Machines on Aero-Engine Work, 1944 A.S.Finlayson

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Preparing for Ford Madox Brown: Pre-Raphaelite Pioneer

Two paintings reunited

Last week the Ford Madox Brown exhibition team met to discuss PR for the show. This was a great opportunity to talk through the rationale for the exhibition, its themes and key works with curator Julian Treuherz. Of the many stories that will be of interest to the media and the public, I was struck by the fact that one of the works in Manchester Art Gallery’s collection will be reunited with its ‘pair’ for the first time in almost 50 years.

In 1932 MAG acquired The English Boy which Brown painted in 1860. This is a delightful portrayal of his son, Oliver, aged 5. A so-called ‘fancy picture’ rather than a portrait, because of its title, it has a companion piece called The Irish Girl, also painted in 1860. Although conceived as a pair the pictures didn’t stay together and The Irish Girl is now at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Conneticut. It will be coming to Manchester for the exhibition which means the two works will be seen together for the first time since 1964.  

I’m looking forward to them side by side. The direct and unsentimental portrayal of the children and the rich colours make these compelling images. The man who commissioned the paintings, was a Leeds stockbroker called T.E. Plint. Plint collected Pre-Raphaelite art and in the 1850s commissioned Brown to paint Work. The model for The Irish Girl was apparently an orange seller who Brown found when he was looking for models for Work. Plint thought The Irish Girl was a ‘gem’ of a painting. For me it is definitely one of the highlights of the forthcoming Ford Madox Brown show.  

Rebecca Milner
Curator: Collections Access

Images:
1. The English Boy, 1860, oil on canvas, Ford Madox Brown (1821-1893), Manchester Art Gallery, © Manchester City Galleries
2. The Irish Girl, 1860, oil on canvas, Ford Madox Brown (1821-1893), Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund (B1989.11), © Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund

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Drumming up an audience
Since I last blogged the programme of gallery changes has really moved on. Millais’ A Flood has come out of store, and looks as sweet as pie. We’re all in mourning a little bit for Ford Madox Brown’s Work, but at the same time excited too, because its transfer to the Conservation Studio means the Ford Madox Brown exhibition is nearly upon us (it starts on 24 September).

In the place where Work used to be is a display of Victorian paintings that also show modern life, the highlight of which is Herkomer’s Hard Times 1885. Well, that’s the official highlight, but I’m rather taken with a smaller work, Frederick Barnard’s A Dress Rehearsal, 1868. We only got it out of the store a few months ago, and now that it’s up in the largest of the nineteenth-century galleries it really holds its own. It shows an acrobat and his son in their attic home. The thoughtful father is putting the son through his paces. All the tools of their trade are scattered around them – including a big drum to drum up an audience, which has a dog in a ruff seated upon it.

Acrobat or Street Posturer
It’s a subject that students of Victorian social history might expect to find in the great work of writer Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, in which he describes all the different street trades. And they’d be right – the profession of ‘Acrobat or Street Posturer’ is described by Mayhew in his third volume, published in 1861. Mayhew writes of the ‘tight-fitting costumes of white calico, with blue or red trimmings’ as if he is describing the very man Barnard has painted.

Frederick Barnard’s career as an artist was mostly spent illustrating journals, especially with pictures of the poor and working classes, so he and Mayhew were working with the same subject material. Barnard was comfortable as a journalistic artist, admitting that he felt more confident making black and white drawings than painting with oil colours. Confident colouring or not, I think this painting has a lot of story and feeling to it – and therefore a lot of potential for gallery interpretation. I imagine performing acrobats in the Victorian galleries before long…

Hannah Williamson
Curator: Collections Access

Images © Manchester City Galleries
1 Installing Millais’  A Flood on Thursday 12 May 2011
2 A Flood, 1870, by Sir Sir John Everett Millais
3 A Dress Rehearsal, 1868, by Frederick Barnard