English artist closely associated with the Pre-Raphaelite circle. Following his training in Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp, Ford Madox Brown lived in Montmartre before returning to England and settling in London in 1844. In 1845 he travelled with his wife to Rome, where he sought out the German Nazarene artists Johann Friedrich Overbeck and Peter Cornelius. During the 1840s he worked on a series of history paintings, and in the latter part of that decade befriended the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, after which his paintings took on a sharp realism and depicted contemporary subjects. He was a founding partner of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. in 1861, designing furniture and stained glass.
