Pretty Baa-Lambs

Ford Madox Brown began 'Pretty Baa-Lambs' in 1851, painting it outdoors during the summer months with the intense commitment to natural observation that characterized his Pre-Raphaelite period. His wife Emma and their infant daughter Catherine appear as the figures in the composition — a young mother watching a small child who reaches toward lambs in a sunlit field. The subject is deceptively simple, its surface pleasantness the vehicle for one of the most radical experiments in outdoor painting in Victorian art: Brown worked in direct sunlight on a white ground, attempting to capture the quality of English summer light with an intensity unprecedented in British landscape and figure painting. He reportedly found the experience physically demanding, working through nausea to achieve the brightness he was pursuing. The Birmingham Museums Trust's version is the primary canvas of this important work.

Brown's decision to paint in direct sunlight with a white ground produced effects of light intensity that were controversial when exhibited — some viewers finding the brightness excessive and unnatural. The handling of the grass and sky achieves a bleaching effect in the strongest light passages that was genuinely without precedent in British painting. The figures are integrated into the outdoor light without the studio convention of separately treating figure and landscape, both subject to the same uncompromising solar illumination.