look closer

The bare hand over the gloved one, painted outdoors in winter until the flesh went the right purple. It is the picture’s whole vocabulary of comfort.

In 1852 about 370,000 people left Britain, the largest exodus in its history to that point: Irish families still running from the famine's shadow, laborers priced out of everything, and, newly, the middle classes, because Australian gold had made leaving look like arithmetic. That summer Ford Madox Brown stood on the dock to see off his friend Thomas Woolner, a sculptor of the Pre-Raphaelite circle who had given up on English patronage and shipped out for the Melbourne diggings. Brown was 31, broke, unfashionable, and privately weighing India for himself. The painting he began that year is the emigration statistic with faces: a young couple on the open stern of a packet boat named, with the century's own irony, Eldorado, the white cliffs shrinking behind them, cabbages for the voyage netted along the rail. He posed himself and his wife Emma for the pair, and painted outdoors through two winters, on days, he noted, when the cold made the flesh look right, meaning the particular purple of hands that have stopped complaining about it. Everything in the tondo is organized around two small warmths: the husband's bare hand gripping his wife's gloved one on his knee, and, almost hidden in her cloak, the tiny fingers of a baby holding her other hand, the third passenger the composition admits only to viewers who look the way parents watch. The man's face is set at the exact temperature between anger and grief that has no English name; the wife watches the country go with the steadier face of the two. Brown wrote that he had chosen educated emigrants deliberately, people bound to England by every tie except the ability to live in it. Woolner, the man the picture saw off, found no gold, came home within two years, and prospered into the Royal Academy after all, which is the joke history played on the painting without diminishing it, since the couple on the canvas are not Woolner; they are the ones who did not come back. Brown himself stayed, stayed poor longer than he deserved, and became the painter Victorian Britain trusted with its work and its leavings. The panel, corners left bare around the oval with the artist's color trials still on them, hangs in Birmingham, in the industrial city that manufactured many of the reasons for the voyage.