Into The Frame: The Four Loves of Ford Madox Brown [Paperback]

In this beautifully written book the four women- two wives and two intensely felt platonic loves- are the focus and the interest rather than the Pre-Raphaelite artist Ford Madox Brown who immortalised them in his paintings. We see them as if we stood before their portraits, looking in at them, standing in the artist's position. For it is manifestly their book and the intense workaholic Ford Madox Brown exists purely in relation to these four remarkable women. This gives a welcome immediacy to their stories, defining them as women rather than appendages to a famous artist as is so often the case.

And what remarkable stories these four women present,their lives and experiences covering more than a century from 1818 to 1927 and reflecting women's educational aspirations and social conditions in general as well as their personal experiences.

Little is known about Madox Brown's first love and wife, his cousin Elisabeth Bromley, his intellectual counterpart who died in her twenties of consumption and who left few traces except for her husband's tenderly executed paintings of her. Emma Hill the sexually vibrant working class girl who was Madox Brown's second wife also remains an enigma despite the copious piantings of her by her husband and other artists such as Rossetti, for though we see her beautiful image reflected over and over and read accounts of her by those who knew her, her inner life remains a mystery since no writings of hers are extant. Why did she have a drinking problem? This is never satisfactorily explained though noted by all her contemporaries.

By contrast much is known of the platonic loves of Madox Brown's later: life the Greek beauty Marie Spartali, an artist in her own right and Matilde Blind, a writer and very much the New Woman. Both provided Madox Brown with intense intellectual engagement though at the end it appears Emma Hill was his enduring love.

Apart from the four exquisitely drawn word portraits of the women their lives are presented by way of copious illustrations from Madox Brown's oeuvre and there are plenty of asides and insights into life in the Victorian period, explaining and setting in context the lives of these very different characters.

The interior life of Madox Brown too comes into relief through his relationships and through their intertwining lives the reader gains a much greater knowledge of his art within the frame of his life. Angela Thirlwell's scholarship does not overwhelm; art history and criticism is so gently threaded through the story as to make it a pleasure to read.

Altogether a lovely book, impeccably researched, presenting new insights into the story of one of the lesser known of the Pre-Raphaelites.

The book is pure magic to me. It is the very best biography I have ever read. It works for me at so many levels. To my amazement, the most powerful impact was to see Ford Madox Brown to emerge so vividly as a person with so much depth by you looking at his life through his eyes at the people who mattered to him most. It strikes me as pure genius. There were so many moments of utter astonishment where one or two sentences made me marvel at the amount of research felt 'behind the scene' and the discipline to not trott it out because it had been so much hard work to do the research, but leave the evidence in the author's voice of understanding and care for the subject. The structure of focusing on a topic rather than on chronology struck me as brilliant in Thirlwell's "Lucy and William: The other Rossettis",but in this new book I am in awe of the way Thirlwell makes me feel Ford Madox Brown's humanity as he honours the women he loved and is in turn honoured by his love for them.

Something else I particularly liked was that the author always showed where she had interpretive ideas with questions of possibilities rather than decided on an interpretation. There is such a sense of truthfulness in the writing that the relationships come to life for me as if I were reading about people living around me now.

This is a beautifully crafted book that is based on a huge amount of research - and yet the research is so painlessly incorporated into the text that you are not aware of it. All you are aware of is a gripping personal story of the four women in the life of Ford Madox Brown. The quality of the writing is truly outstanding but it is the deep insights that the author gives us into the lives of the women and of the artist himself that make it memorable. She also has a great gift of describing and analysing the paintings, drawings and poems of the protagonists. The close relationships that Ford Madox Brown had with his two wives and two other women are sensitively characterised such that you feel as if you know the people yourself. It doesn't matter whether or not the relationships with his `lovers' were physical - there appears to be no evidence on that matter- what is important is the incredible emotional intensity of the friendships. We learn a lot about the customs of the time from this book but above all it is a life-enhancing story of friendships and loyalty and great paintings. You do not have to be interested in the pre-raphaelites to enjoy this book, although for those who are it is especially illuminating. Surely, this wonderful and moving book will become a classic.