Religious Foundations: Second Voices of Communication, The English Contemporary Figurative Artist, 1848-1870

Abstract

Augustus Leopold Egg (1816-1863), Ford Madox Brown (1821-1893) and William Holman Hunt (1827-1910), responded intellectually and forcefully to the socioeconomic and cultural transformations driven by industrialisation. They observed and experienced the uncertainties of their time, and these observations are depicted in their contemporary genre paintings, realised on religious foundations. It is a meeting of these two styles, reality and religion, that define their modern figurative paintings, as accurate accounts of the Victorian era, during the period covered by this thesis, 1848 to 1870.

The threads that linked these three artists are evident in their paintings, upon which this thesis will focus. First, is their deep knowledge of the Bible, and second, is their understanding of the constancy of the Bible as a common source of communication. Their religious foundations, represented by their selected Biblical texts and latent spiritual forms, gave their contemporary genre paintings second voices of communication that interacted with their modern human images, their first voices of communication. It is this combination of first and second voices, that provided their paintings with a structure, through which they consolidated their messages, targeting the mid-Victorian public’s obsolete modes of behaviour, that no longer had any relevance in what was becoming, a radically different world.

The outcomes of this thesis will establish these first and second voices need to be treated as a cohesive structure of text and image, when studying and interpreting the complexities of the economic, social, cultural and religious implications, that Egg, Brown and Hunt ‘preached’ through their art, to the mid-Victorian public.