Ford Madox Brown

Ford Madox Brown was the older painter who stood just outside the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and shaped it anyway. Trained on the Continent, he taught the young Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and shared the group's taste for bright colour, sharp detail and serious modern subjects, though he never formally joined their society.

Two paintings hold his reputation. The Last of England shows a young couple on a ship's deck, wrapped against the spray, emigrating from a country that has no place for them, their faces set and sad. And Work, which took him over a decade, is a crowded, sunlit London street where he tries to paint every class of Victorian society at once, from navvies digging the road to idle gentry passing by.

Late in life he took on a huge public task, twelve large murals for the new town hall in Manchester telling the city's history. He was still working on them in his 70s and finished the last only shortly before he died in 1893, having spent his final years largely on that northern city's walls.