Pretty Baa-Lambs | |
---|---|
Artist | Ford Madox Brown |
Year | 1851 |
Medium | oil on panel |
Dimensions | 60.9 cm× 76.2 cm(24.0 in× 30.0 in) |
Location | Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, Birmingham |
The Pretty Baa-Lambs is an oil-on-panel painting executed in 1851 by the English Pre-Raphaelite artist Ford Madox Brown and part of the collection of Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery.
Painted 'en plein air' in bright sunshine, the work depicts the artist's model and mistress Emma Hill and their infant daughter Catherine Madox Brown, dressed in 18th century clothes, feeding grass to a group of lambs. In the rear the family nursemaid is on her knees pulling more grass. [1]
The picture is a simple representation of family life in what was Ford Madox Brown's first attempt at painting out of doors, at the time a novel concept, using a limited palette of green, blue and white with a few red highlights. The figures were painted in the garden of their Stockwell house in south London, the lambs being provided on a daily basis by a local farmer, and the background scenery of Clapham Common added afterwards.
The artist himself was somewhat irritated when asked what the moral of the picture was, if it for instance was representation of the Madonna and child. In his catalogue notes for its first public exhibition in 1852, he said there was no hidden meaning in the picture, it was simply 'a lady, a baby, two lambs, a servant maid and some grass'. [2]
A smaller replica of the work is in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. [3]
Ford Madox Brown was a British painter of moral and historical subjects, notable for his distinctively graphic and often Hogarthian version of the Pre-Raphaelite style. Arguably, his most notable painting was Work (1852–1865). Brown spent the latter years of his life painting the twelve works known as The Manchester Murals, depicting Mancunian history, for Manchester Town Hall.
The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology on Beaumont Street, Oxford, England, is Britain's first public museum. Its first building was erected in 1678–1683 to house the cabinet of curiosities that Elias Ashmole gave to the University of Oxford in 1677. It is also the world's second university museum, after the establishment of the Kunstmuseum Basel in 1661 by the University of Basel.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English painters, poets, and art critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens and Thomas Woolner who formed a seven-member "Brotherhood" partly modelled on the Nazarene movement. The Brotherhood was only ever a loose association and their principles were shared by other artists of the time, including Ford Madox Brown, Arthur Hughes and Marie Spartali Stillman. Later followers of the principles of the Brotherhood included Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris and John William Waterhouse.
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