I finally got around to seeing the Fort Madox Brown retrospective at Manchester City Gallery before it closed, biting my Yorkshire lip as I paid the entrance fee.
His painting of Southend in 1846 was very interesting, essentially a rural scene, but with the docks and cranes visible in the background, and a red jacketed pony and trap driver, assumed to be a postman. A very modern scene, which linked up with my thoughts on the Oldham Panorama, created thirty years later (see the post below).
Madox Brown’s unfinished ‘cartoon’ for John Kay was interesting too, depicting a struggle between a loom owner and a loom breaker. Its finished version is one of the twelve ‘Manchester Murals’ in the town hall, but this one, with its white space, looked like some sort of postmodern intervention. What’s interesting about this unfinished piece is that the white space can be read as utopia, literally an a-topos, but a space of possibility. It’s perhaps also poetic that the white space was eventually filled in, and is now protected within a municipal space, regulated and maintained by the state, but perhaps I’m reading a little too much into it with this last point.
