treatment, Brouwer was frequently brought into low company and dissipated scenes, which he delineated with great spirit and vivid colouring in his pictures. The unfortunate artist died in a hospital at Antwerp at the early age of thirty-two, consequently his works are few and rarely met with. The largest collection of his masterpieces is in the Pinakothek at Munich.
BROWN, CHARLES BROCKDEN (1771–1810), American novelist, was born of Quaker parents in Philadelphia, on the 17th of January 1771. Of delicate constitution and retiring habits, he early devoted himself to study; his principal amusement was the invention of ideal architectural designs, devised on the most extensive and elaborate scale. This characteristic talent for construction subsequently assumed the shape of Utopian projects for perfect commonwealths, and at a later period of a series of novels distinguished by the ingenuity and consistent evolution of the plot. The transition between these intellectual phases is marked by a juvenile romance entitled Carsol, not published until after the author’s death, which professes to depict an imaginary community, and shows how thoroughly the young American was inspired by Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, whose principal writings had recently made their appearance. From the latter he derived the idea of his next work, The Dialogue of Alcuin (1797), an enthusiastic but inexperienced essay on the question of woman’s rights and liberties. From Godwin he learned his terse style, condensed to a fault, but too laconic for eloquence or modulation, and the art of developing a plot from a single psychological problem or mysterious circumstance. The novels which he now rapidly produced offer the strongest affinity to Caleb Williams, and if inferior to that remarkable work in subtlety of mental analysis, greatly surpass it in affluence of invention and intensity of poetical feeling. All are wild and weird in conception, with incidents bordering on the preternatural, yet the limit of possibility is never transgressed. In Wieland; or the Transformation (1798), the first and most striking, a seemingly inexplicable mystery is resolved into a case of ventriloquism. Arthur Mervyn; or Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1798–1800), is remarkable for the description of the epidemic of yellow fever in Philadelphia. Edgar Huntly (Philadelphia, 1801), a romance rich in local colouring, is remarkable for the effective use made of somnambulism, and anticipates Cooper’s introduction of the American Indian into fiction. Ormond (1799) is less powerful, but contains one character, Constantia Dudley, which excited the enthusiastic admiration of Shelley. Two subsequent novels, Clara Howard (1801) and Jane Talbot (1804), dealing with ordinary life, proved failures, and Brown betook himself to compiling a general system of geography, editing a periodical, and an annual register, and writing political pamphlets. He died of consumption on the 22nd of February 1810. He is depicted by his biographer as the purest and most amiable of men, and in spite of a certain formality, due perhaps to his Quaker education, the statement is borne out by his correspondence.
The life of Charles Brockden Brown was written by his friend William Dunlap (Philadelphia, 1815). See also William H. Prescott, Biographical and Critical Miscellanies (New York, 1845). His works in 6 vols. were published at Philadelphia in 1857 with a “life,” and in a limited and more elaborate edition (1887).
BROWN, FORD MADOX (1821–1893), English painter, was born at Calais on the 16th of April 1821. His father was Ford Brown, a retired purser in the navy; his mother, Caroline Madox, of an old Kentish family. His paternal grandfather was Dr John Brown, who established the Brunonian Theory of Medicine. Ford Madox Brown was the only child of his parents, save for a daughter who died young. In childhood he was shifted about a good deal between France and England; and having shown from the age of six or seven a turn for drawing he was taken, when fourteen years old, and with meagre acquirements in the way of general tuition, to Bruges, and placed under the instruction of Gregorius, a pupil of David. His principal instructor, however, from about 1837, was Baron Wappers, of Antwerp, then regarded as a great light of the Belgian school. From him the youth learned the technique not only of oil painting but of various other branches of art. At a very early age Brown attained a remarkable degree of force in drawing and painting, as attested by an extant oil-portrait of his father, done at an age not exceeding fifteen. His first composition, towards 1836, represented a blind beggar and his child; his first exhibited work, 1837, was “Job on the Ash-heap”; the first exhibited work in London (at the Royal Academy, 1840), “The Giaour’s Confession,” from Byron’s poem. Both his parents died before 1840, leaving to the young painter a moderate competence, which soon was materially reduced. In 1840 Brown completed a large picture, “The Execution of Mary, queen of Scots,” strong in dramatic effect and in handling, with rather sombre colour; from this time forth he must be regarded as a proficient artist, independent in his point of view and strenuous in execution. He contributed to the cartoon competitions, 1844 and 1845, for the Houses of Parliament—“Adam and Eve after the Fall,” “The Body of Harold brought to William the Conqueror,” and “The Spirit of Justice.” These highly remarkable cartoons passed not wholly unobserved, but not one of them obtained a prize. The years 1840 to 1845 were passed in Paris, London and Rome: towards the middle of 1846 Brown settled permanently in London. In 1841 he had married his cousin Elizabeth Bromley, who died of consumption in 1846, leaving a daughter, Lucy, who in 1874 became the wife of William M. Rossetti. Not long after being left a widower, Brown took a second wife, Emma Hill, who figures in many of his pictures. She had two children who grew up: Catherine, who married Dr Franz Hueffer, the musical scholar and critic, and Oliver, who died in 1874 in his twentieth year. All three children showed considerable ability in painting, and Oliver in romance as well. The second Mrs Brown died in 1890.
The most marked distinction of Brown as an artist may be defined as vigorous invention of historic or dramatic scenes, carried out with a great regard to individuality in the personages, expressions and accessories of incident and detail, not excluding the familiar, the peculiar and the semi-grotesque, when these seem to subserve the general intent. Owing, however, to his association with artists of the so-called “pre-Raphaelite” movement (which began late in 1848), and especially with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who received some training in his studio in the spring of that year, he has been regarded sometimes as the precursor or initiator of this movement, and sometimes as a direct co-operator in it. His claim to be regarded as a precursor or initiator is not strong; though it is true that even before 1841 he had pondered the theory (not then much in vogue) that a picture ought to present the veritable light and shade proper to some one moment in the day, and his “Manfred on the Jungfrau” (1841) exemplifies this principle to some extent; it reappears in his very large picture of “Chaucer at the Court of Edward III.” (now in the public gallery of Sydney, Australia), which, although projected in 1845, was not brought to completion until 1851. As to becoming a direct co-operator in the pre-Raphaelite movement, he did not join the “Brotherhood,” though it would have been open to him to do so; but for some years his works exhibited a marked influence derived from the movement, not on the whole to their clear advantage. The principal pictures of this class are: “The Pretty Baa-lambs”; “Work” (a street scene at Hampstead); and “The Last of England” (an emigration subject, one of his most excellent achievements): dating between 1851 and 1863. “Christ Washing Peter’s Feet” (now in the National Gallery of British Art) comes within the same range of dates, and is a masterly work; here the pre-Raphaelite influence is less manifest. Altogether it may be averred that the conception and introduction of the pre-Raphaelite scheme, such as it appeared to the public eye in 1849 and 1850, belong to Millais, Holman Hunt and Rossetti, rather than to Brown.
Other leading pictures by Brown are the following:—“Cordelia at the Bedside of Lear”; “Shakespeare”; “Jacob and Joseph’s Coat”; “Elijah and the Widow’s Son”; “Cordelia’s Portion”; “The Entombment”; “Romeo and Juliet” (the parting on the balcony); “Don Juan and Haidee”; “Cromwell on his Farm”; “Cromwell, Protector of the
