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signed and indistinctly dated l.r.: F M Brown. 184*

oil on canvas

PROVENANCE

Probably Helen Bromley, the sitters' mother;
Probably given by Helen Bromley to the artist, and thence by descent via his daughter Lucy and her husband, William Michael Rossetti
EXHIBITED

London, Grafton Galleries, Exhibition of the Works of Ford Madox Brown, 1897, no. 87
LITERATURE AND REFERENCES

MS letter from the artist to his daughter Lucy Rossetti, after 1886 (Angeli papers, special collections, University of British Columbia, Vancouver);
F. M. Hueffer, Ford Madox Brown: A Record of his Life and Work, 1896, pp. 433, 434;
W. D. Paden, The Ancestry and Families of Ford Madox Brown, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, vol. 50, no. 1, autumn 1967, pp. 130-131
CATALOGUE NOTE

Several of Brown's earliest works are portraits of his relatives the Bromleys, who lived at Meopham in Kent. Ford Madox Hueffer, the artist's grandson described Brown's visit to the Bromley's in 1840 'Here he painted portraits of all his relations there resident. They are mostly quaint little medallions.' Among the portraits was one of Elizabeth, Brown's cousin with whom he fell madly in love and married later that same year (sadly she died only six years later).

The present picture portrays the three eldest children of Brown's cousin and brother-in-law, Augustus Frederick Bromley (1815-1843) and his wife Helen (née Weir). Augustus and Helen had married in Paris in 1840 at a time when Brown was resident in the French capital, studying the Old Masters at the Louvre. Brown had painted both Helen and Augustus during the stay in Meopham in 1840 and other portraits of members of the Bromley family are known to have been painted in 1844, including the lavish portrait of the older generation of Bromleys now at Manchester City Art Gallery.

The sitters in the present portrait are as follows; the little girl in the centre dressed in white is the oldest child Helen Bromley with her brother Augustus to her right holding a hoop and stick and her sister Louisa seated to her left. Lamentably, none of the children lived beyond their teenage years, the two younger children dying in 1845 and 1846 and Helen surviving only until 1855 when she died aged seventeen. There has been much confusion regarding when this portrait was painted and the only certainty is that it was in the early 1840s before Augustus junior's death in 1845. The painting is dated but the last digit has proved difficult to decipher. When it was exhibited in Brown's memorial exhibition in 1897 it was stated that it was painted in 1841 and Hueffer lists it as being painted in 1840, but mentions it again as being painted in 1845. Although 1844 is the most likely date for the painting, it is strange that Brown did not include a fourth child, Elizabeth Clara who was born in 1843.

The portrait was presumably painted for Helen Bromley, the children's mother who ran a school in Greenwich where Brown's daughter Lucy was educated. At a later date the portrait returned to the artist's possession and was given to Lucy who after her death in 1894, a year after her father, bequeathed the picture to her husband William Michael Rossetti, the brother of the artist Dante Gabriel and of the poet Christina.