Ford Madox Brown

Ford Madox Brown (1821–1893), born at Calais, was a painter, a veteran leader of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, and a writer and lecturer on art. He spent eleven years on a series of frescoes for Manchester Town Hall.

He wrote sonnets to accompany his pictures, among them “The Last of England”, and a sonnet on the death of his son, the young writer Oliver Madox Brown. The poems here are taken from Edmund Clarence Stedman’s A Victorian Anthology, 1837–1895 (1895).