Life beyond the canvas

Angela Thirlwell’s previous book was a double biography of William Rossetti (brother to the more famous Dante Gabriel) and his wife Lucy (daughter of the more famous Ford Madox Brown).

Angela Thirlwell’s previous book was a double biography of William Rossetti (brother to the more famous Dante Gabriel) and his wife Lucy (daughter of the more famous Ford Madox Brown). Now she has once again turned her attention to the margins of the Pre-Raphaelite group, with a joint portrait of the four women who influenced Ford Madox Brown: his two wives, Elisabeth and Emma, and two women for whom he had spiritual affinities, and (probably platonic) romantic yearnings.

Elisabeth was, in reality, the least influential, for her life was pathetically brief. In 1841 the 19-year-old student painter had spent his childhood in Europe, where his father, a retired naval purser, had moved to eke out a small pension. Elisabeth was on her way home from finishing school in Germany when they met, and Brown was instantly smitten by his sophisticated, beautiful first cousin; himself only 19, he was so youthful looking that, at the wedding ceremony the vicar asked him when the bridegroom would arrive. The couple had a happy few years, and a child, but tuberculosis took Elisabeth, aged only 28.

Brown returned to an England he barely knew, and soon began a relationship with the illiterate daughter of a labourer. This was not unusual in his circle. Lizzie Siddal was the daughter of an ironmonger, Janey Morris the daughter of an ostler, while the father of Rossetti’s long-term companion, Fanny Cornforth, was a blacksmith (although Thirlwell wrongly says that Cornforth was a prostitute). Brown taught Emma to read, arranged for her to attend school and ultimately married her, and they were to remain more or less happily married until her death in 1890.