Ford Madox Brown's Protestant Medievalism: Chaucer and Wycliffe

The appeal of the Middle Ages in the nineteenth century has countless manifestations and as many explanations. A simple view of Victorian medievalism as a nostalgic wish for "Merrie England" and escapism, hilariously challenged by Kingsley Amis in his academic novel Lucky Jim (1954), has generally been replaced with a widespread recognition of it as "a social language composed of myths, legends, rituals, and symbols that was appropriated by Victorians both to criticize and to affirm their own times" (Dellheim 39, cf. Yates 59-70). The Victorian age, at least outwardly, was profoundly religious, albeit science had raised questions. (1) Serious disputes about religion included the complex relation of religion and art, not least because Protestantism strongly supported national identity. Indeed the Catholic Emancipation Act, which removed most of the restrictions placed on Roman Catholics as part of the Reformation, was passed only in 1829. Thus a fundamental issue is why and how a strongly Protestant society could deploy language and symbols from the Catholic Middle Ages. Because literature is more likely than painting to be read for ambiguity, a more ready understanding of Protestant medievalism may come from a focus on visual representations of Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340-1400) and John Wycliffe (1328-1384) in historical painting, itself designed to glorify national achievement and a genre seriously rearticulated by the Victorians and often closely tied to literature. Since sympathy with Victorian medievalism is at variance with high praise of treatment of contemporary subjects by Ford Madox Brown (1821-93), it is useful to introduce this discussion of his Chaucer and Wycliffe portraits with a few broad critical points. The end of the twentieth century has favored either the ignoring of history, or its deconstruction, or a political agenda that Brown's contemporary paintings advance. (2) Kenneth Bendiner's five chapters in The Art of Ford Madox Brown (1998), for example, are Archaism, Humor, Realism, Aestheticism, A Social Conscience. With each topic Bendiner shows a Whiggish progression toward the excellence of the later paintings in which "Brown's archaism ebbed as his realism grew"; he finds in the Chaucer painting "humor that gives a realist bent, undercutting the pomp or fantasy of the subjects" and discerns a "questioning" that is "fiercely critical" of the nationalism shown in his paintings. Bendiner notes how in Wycliffe Reading His Translation a "marginal note of incongruity" disturbs the ideal, and the Manchester murals show a "strong point of view at odds with the main subject," of which Wycliffe's Protestantism is a part (21, 59, 99, 31, 27). Another indication of changed responses is Terri Hardin's caption: "This painting reflects Brown's incipient socialism. Celebrated English reformer John Wycliffe was, through his beliefs and work, a champion of the people against the abuse of the church." The illustration lacks Brown's Gothic framework with the rondels of Catholicism and Protestantism (204). While favoring social conscience, Bendiner acknowledges that Brown was "something of a nationalist" whose "attraction to themes from English literature and history persisted long after such widespread fads of the first half of the 19th century had faded. His entire career was devoted to British heroes, British history, British poetry, British theater, and British life" (98). As Lucy Feiden Rabin discerns, Brown's paintings provide an evolving concept of the hero: The simple correspondence Brown saw between contemporary human behavior and legendary events of the past led to a new image of the modern hero ... the slowly formed concept of the down-to-earth hero based on observations of living human beings ... periods, costumes, individualized ... created images of reality out of the eclectic formal elements of the painting, and the painting itself expressed the idea of the continuity of mankind's experience. …