The Last of England: compositional design

Ford Madox Brown

Date: 1852

Materials: Pencil

Preparatory work

This is one of the most elaborate and detailed of all Brown's surviving drawings.

The artist moved to Hampstead in June 1852, and without domestic distractions (Emma and baby Catherine were spending the summer in Dover) he began two major paintings - 'Work' and 'An English Autumn Afternoon' of which Brown wrote in his diary "Having given this up about the End of Octr & decided that I should not have time to finish the 'Work' for the next acady Exhn [sic - Royal Academy exhibition] designed the subject of 'The Last of England', at the colo[u]red sketch & cartoon of which I worked till Xmas".

Friend's emigration 

Fresh in his mind would have been the emigration of Thomas Woolner to Australia on 15 July 1852; although there is no supporting evidence, Brown may have seen his friend off from Gravesend, where Brown's elder daughter Lucy lived with her aunt.

This is presumably the 'cartoon'; the 'colo[u]red sketch', probably a watercolour, is unlocated. Brown's dealer, D. T. White, bought this drawing in September 1855 (for £7), along with the finished painting, for which he gave £150. White had already paid £10 for the coloured sketch, and sold all 3 three works to the collector B. G. Windus, who lent seven works to Brown's one-man exhibition in 1865, though not the oil itself, which he had sold in 1859. 

Changes to the painting

All the essential elements of the composition are fully worked out in this design, although Brown was to refine several details when he resumed work on the painting in September 1854. The chief amendments would be the addition of a small child (modelled after Catherine) on the left, and a row of cabbages on the taffrail in the foreground. The lifeboat is here prosaically lettered "WHITE HORSE LINE, AUSTRALIA"; in the oil it bears the legend "ELDORADO", punningly underlining both the emigrants' hopes (striking it lucky in the gold fields) and their slim chances of success.