Cordelia Parting from her Sisters (1854): Art, History and Details

Cordelia Parting from her Sisters (1854) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Ford Madox Brown (British, 1821–1893).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Reimagining English history was one way that Victorian (1837–1901) artists rooted themselves during a period of tremendous social and political change and life-altering technological advances. Ford Madox Brown’s expressive and vividly colored sketch for an unrealized project takes a story from Britain’s most famous playwright, Shakespeare. The artist chooses the dramatic moment when King Lear’s daughter Cordelia parts ways with her sisters.

Object facts

• Title: Cordelia Parting from her Sisters
• Date: 1854
• Creator attribution: Ford Madox Brown (British, 1821–1893)
• Culture: England, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: pen and oil on paper on panel
• Dimensions: Framed: 30.5 x 36.8 x 3.5 cm (12 x 14 1/2 x 1 3/8 in.); Unframed: 19.5 x 26.5 cm (7 11/16 x 10 7/16 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 2013.261

A detail from the museum

In 1861, Ford Madox Brown became a founding member of William Morris’s decorative arts company. Besides painting, he also designed stained glass and furniture.

Collection credit

Gift in memory of Helen Borowitz

Further reading listed by the museum

• Borowitz, Helen O. "King Lear in the Art of Ford Madox Brown." Victorian Studies, Vol 21, no. 3 (Spring, 1978). Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN: 309-334.
• Surtees, Virginia. The Diary of Ford Madox Brown. New Haven, CT: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 1981.
• Macleod, Dianne Sachko. Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.