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Inspiration from Artists week 45 Bonus artist Ford Maddox Brown.

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Paul (Dixie) Dean

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Welcome to this weekends bonus artist the featured artist is Ford Madox  Brown 1821 - 1893.  Ford Madox Brown was a British painter of moral and historical subjects, notable for his distinctively graphic often Hogarthian ( Hogarth a artist we will feature at another date) versions of the Pre Rapchalite style . (Wikipedia quote ). 

Tessa Gwynne

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Another skilful Artist. I knew the name but couldn’t have brought to mind his work instantly. These are obviously story telling scenes which I usually like, but find some of these a bit strange! I do like the girl with blue flowers, and will look him up to see more.
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Tony Auffret

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I have always found Ford Maddox Brown the least appealing of the Pre-Rapahelites, I feel his paintings are, for want of a better phrase, a bit brown.  The Pretty Baa Lambs, Dixie's first posting being a notable exception, and possibly the only one I might have thought of posting.  Even that strikes me as a little unsettling.  Despite the artist's insistence that there was no hidden meaning, it has always struck me, and presumably many others, that there was a quasi-religious overtone to the painting,
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Paul (Dixie) Dean

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I thought at first seeing the painting with the sheep that it was a religious painting.  The first glance at ir before opening it up to look closer I thought it was a Europeanised painting of Mary , carrying baby Jesus. I still think it has a religious look to it.  

Norrette Moore

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The picture Last of England immediately took me back to being about 9 years old and my mother pointing out to us - the infant's hand in the mother's hand, indicating a baby under the shawl. A picture for our times.  His other work is a bit of a curates egg...
With Sarah, Phil, Ellen, Rose the dentist, and the granddaughter whose name I forget.

Robert Jones, NAPA

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I think  Wikipedia is way off in describing his style as 'Hogarthian' - there might be something in it in the narrowest sense imaginable, but on the whole he had far more in common with much later painters than Hogarth.  His pictures vary hugely in their appeal to me - there are better reproductions of the penultimate one shown: which is stiff, and over-posed, but still interesting.  His abilities were clearly huge - even just in mixing and applying colour.  But there's something wistfully-soulfully-romanticized-Victorian about it at times; he's turned A Farewell to England, up above, from a sad but compelling picture into something of a choc-box image. I suppose that's where the Hogarth connection comes from - he did paint, now and then but not often, scenes from the life of the times: but Hogarth was never sentimental, and FMB so often was.