Oil paint on mahogany
Tate Collection
Works with images
General Collection
Robert Vernon
Collection
<a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/william-mulready-392" aria-label="More by William Mulready" data-gtm-name="header_link_artist" data-gtm-destination="page--artist">William Mulready</a>
Ford Crossing Ford
Presented by Robert Vernon 1847
actions: processes and functions
adults
animals: mammals
birth to death
carrying / holding
child
children
ford
horse
landscape
man
people
river
rocky
society
stages of life
water: inland
woman
wooded
<p>At first sight this picture seems to show a slight episode taken from rural life. But in Mulready’s hands it acquires a much weightier meaning. A group of people have travelled over a rock-strewn landscape and are passing through a ford. The young girl, the first to experience this rite of passage, is the main subject. Her glance tells us that she is making a momentous choice: which of the two youths carrying her is the most desirable? The old, who have made their choices, and the young, who will do so one day, hesitate at the water’s edge beyond.</p><p><em>Gallery label, November 2016</em></p>
painting oil paint mahogany
5 November 2012 – 20 July 2014
2014-07-20
5 November 2012 – 20 July 2014
2014-07-20
2012-11-05
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2012-11-05
Gallery 9
Collection based display
The Ford (‘Crossing the Ford’)
support: 606 × 502 mm
Presented by <a href="/search?gid=999999978" data-gtm-name="tombstone_link_bequest" data-gtm-destination="list-page--search-results">Robert Vernon</a> 1847
<p>This work, exhibited with considerable critical success at the Royal Academy in 1842 as <i>The Ford</i> (later retitled <i>Crossing the Ford</i>), was painted when Mulready was at the height of his artistic career. A writer in the <i>Art Union</i> observed: ‘(<i>The Ford</i>) sustains the high reputation of its author; it is a work of surpassing beauty, grace and excellence – one of the most valuable paintings ever produced in England’ (<i>Art Union</i>, 1842, p.121). </p>
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<br/>The painting is a closely-observed rural scene. A young girl is carried across a stream by two youths; their traveling companions wait in the shadows on foot and horseback and prepare to cross behind them. The background landscape is hilly and rocky, opening up to a distant blue horizon. As with Mulready’s other narrative works of the period, this rural idyll is imbued with symbolic meaning. The lyrical intensity of the scene and the close psychological connection between the three central figures echoes the theme of courtship Mulready explored in 1839 in <i>The Sonnet</i> and <i>First Love</i> (both Victoria and Albert Museum, London). The theme of crossing water illustrating a rite of passage to adulthood was a familiar one, used by J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) and other nineteenth-century artists and writers. Pointon (p.166) notes the painting’s implicit eroticism, acceptable to the Victorian spectator by virtue of its rural, Arcadian setting. A critic writing in 1852 remarked that the painting was: ‘composed into a charming bit of rusticity, treated with much purity of taste and feeling. The subject is one that might very easily have been vulgarised, though it was perfectly safe on that score in the hands of Mr. Mulready.’ (<i>Art Journal</i>, May 1852, p.158.)
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<br/>Mulready began painting in transparent glazes and semi-solid pure pigments on a white ground in the 1830s. This produced the luminosity and brilliant purity of colour which characterise his later works, foreshadowing the Pre-Raphaelite palette. Mulready’s sketchbook records his aim of combining ‘the greatest quantity of light consistent with the greatest quantity of colour’ (quoted in Heleniak, p.136). In <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/mulready-the-ford-crossing-the-ford-n00395" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>N00395</span></a> this can be seen particularly in the vivid colouring of the flesh tones and drapery of the central figures. Mulready’s approach to colour was undoubtedly influenced by seeing works by the Venetian painters Titian (c.1485–1576) and Tintoretto (1518–94) at the British Institution ‘Old Masters’ exhibition of 1815.
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<br/>Mulready’s study and treatment of shadows contributed to the freshness and purity of colour in his late works. A sketchbook note reads: ‘<i>The blue that prevails in a local colour should also prevail in its shade</i>, unless satisfactorily accounted for by reflected light’ (quoted in Heleniak, p.136). According to the Redgraves, Mulready ‘seemed to have a great dislike to losing his <i>ground</i>’, and often, as with <span>N00395</span>, the preparatory drawing is visible on the white ground of the panel as part of the finished painting. 
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<br/>A writer in <i>Blackwood’s Magazine</i> in 1843 criticized Mulready’s innovative use of colour in <i>Crossing the Ford</i>, writing that ‘Mr. Mulready has fallen into a reprehensible style of colouring’. On the other hand, the Redgraves wrote that, ‘The works completed by him between 1839 and 1848 are the most perfect in story, colour and execution of any of his productions. The chiaroscuro is excellent, the colour rich and jewel-like, the execution refined and perfect of its kind.’ (Richard and Samuel Redgrave, <i>A Century of Painters of the English School</i>, London 1866, p.298.)
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<p><i>Crossing the Ford</i> was bought by Mulready’s patron Robert Vernon in 1842 for 600 guineas, in three installments, and was given by him to the nation in 1847. There is a related pen and ink drawing in the Henry E. Huntington Art Gallery, San Marino, Italy; a chalk cartoon for the work (now in a private collection) was exhibited at the Royal Academy, London in 1847. On the back of the panel is a sketch for another work on a similar theme by Mulready, <i>The First Voyage</i> 1833 (Bury Art Gallery), which shows a child in a tub being pushed and towed across a stream.
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<br/><b>Further reading:</b></p>
<h1>
<a name="Heading14"></a>Marcia Pointon, <i>William Mulready 1786 –1863</i>, exhibition catalogue, Victoria and Albert Museum, London 1986, reproduced p.163.
<br/><a name="Heading15"></a>Kathryn Moore Heleniak, <i>William Mulready</i>, New Haven and London 1980, reproduced p.128.</h1>
<p><i>William Mulready 1786–1863</i>, exhibition catalogue, City Art Gallery, Bristol 1964.
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<br/>Cathy Johns
<br/>April 2002
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Summary
2010-03-19T00:00:00
summary
SHORT_TEXT
<div class="text">
<p>At first sight this picture seems to show a slight episode taken from rural life. But in Mulready’s hands it acquires a much weightier meaning. A group of people have travelled over a rock-strewn landscape and are passing through a ford. The young girl, the first to experience this rite of passage, is the main subject. Her glance tells us that she is making a momentous choice: which of the two youths carrying her is the most desirable? The old, who have made their choices, and the young, who will do so one day, hesitate at the water’s edge beyond.</p>
</div>

Display caption
2016-11-15T00:00:00
display-caption
DISPLAY_CAPTION
actions: processes and functions adults animals: mammals birth to death carrying / holding child children ford horse landscape man people river rocky society stages of life water: inland woman wooded