Emigration Paintings: Visual Texts and Mobility
Emigration Paintings: Visual Texts and Mobility
Chapter Four looks at representations of emigration in narrative paintings. The chapter explores how even in the visual realm, emigration is rendered into its textual components. It focusses in particular on five paintings of the mid-century: Ford Madox Brown’s The Last of England (1855), Richard Redgrave’s The Emigrant’s Last Sight of Home (1858), Thomas Webster’s A Letter from the Colonies (1852), James Collinson’s Answering the Emigrant’s Letter (1850) and Abraham Solomon’s Second Class–the Parting (1854). In each of the paintings, emigration manifests itself through the texts of emigration literature, be it an emigrant’s letter, a map, a shipping advertisement or the name of the ship. However, the chapter argues that these emigration paintings eschewed the standard emigrant success story that circulated in print. Instead, these paintings construct a dynamic between image and text in order to emphasise the pain and uncertainty of emigration.
Keywords: Ford Madox Brown, Richard Redgrave, James Collinson, Thomas Webster, Abraham Solomon, Emigration Literature, Narrative Paintings, Domesticity, Mobility
Edinburgh Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
