The Last of England

Ford Madox Brown’s The Last of England, painted between 1852 and 1855, depicts a young couple huddled on the deck of an emigrant ship, turning for a last look at the English shore they are leaving behind. The circular format, painted in meticulous detail, brings the viewer uncomfortably close to the pair. Brown conceived the work after a friend emigrated to Australia, and it became the most celebrated Victorian image of the great nineteenth-century exodus.