Ford Madox Brown, Cultural Experience, and the Promise of the Replica

This chapter reviews some of the issues associated with replication in Ford Madox Brown Diary and in the biography by his grandson, Ford Madox Hueffer. It outlines the relationship between Brown’s broader cultural concerns and his replications of Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois and Work, two of his most inventive designs. The chapter proposes that Brown’s idea of replication carries a form of authority that has not been recognized by modern scholars. From Boime’s perspective, Brown’s version of realism is a kind of pathology that inhibits his capacity to see the true nature of social relations within modernity. Brown, by retaining control over specific designs, was offering a vision of how his labor might remain relatively free in a market economy which, in many instances, reduced the artist to a supplier of generic consumer goods. In conclusion, the replica was a public manifestation of Brown’s deep interest in the composition of the Victorian art world.