Romeo and Juliet

Ford Madox Brown painted this treatment of Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet' in 1870, returning to the play that had attracted Pre-Raphaelite attention repeatedly as a narrative of youthful passionate love destroyed by social division and family vendetta. By 1870, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had long dissolved as a formal entity but its former members continued to share artistic and social connections, and Brown's return to a Shakespearean subject reflects the sustained literary culture that had always been central to the movement. The Delaware Art Museum in the United States holds an important collection of Pre-Raphaelite work — largely due to the collecting activities of Samuel Bancroft Jr. in the late nineteenth century — and Brown's 'Romeo and Juliet' forms part of this significant American holding of the movement's art.

The night scene of Romeo's departure from Juliet's balcony required Brown to manage the specific atmospheric and lighting conditions of the play's moonlit Verona setting. The figures' physical relationship — the separation the composition must enact while still connecting them — creates the visual expression of the scene's emotional content. Brown's late technique provides a somewhat different handling than his earlier Pre-Raphaelite precision but the figure work retains his characteristic psychological engagement.