In 1849 the work of Madox Brown appeared for the first time beside that of Rossetti. “Cordelia’s Portion,” a highly imaginative and nobly dramatic composition, was hung in the Free Exhibition at Hyde Park Corner, in company with Rossetti’s “Girlhood of Mary Virgin.” His next important picture, “Chaucer at the Court of Edward III.,” occupied the painter for several years, and was produced at the Royal Academy of 1851—the memorable season of Hunt’s “Valentine and Sylvia,” and Millais’s “Woodman’s Daughter.” The “Chaucer,” now in Australia, received the Liverpool Academy’s annual prize of £50 in 1852, and was selected by Government for the Paris Exhibition Loan Collection of English paintings in 1855. The departure of his young friend Woolner for Australia in 1854 suggested to Madox Brown the subject of his most popular and in some respects his most successful picture, “The Last of England,” finished in 1855, and now exhibited in the Art Gallery of the Corporation of Birmingham. It was his visit to Gravesend, to bid farewell to Woolner as he embarked for the Antipodes, at the time when the emigration movement was at its height, that inspired the elder painter with that homely idyll of emigrant life—that masterpiece in the dramatic and emotional presentment of modern and familiar romance. In 1857 he painted his great symbolic picture “Work,” which has been pronounced “the finest Pre- Raphaelite picture in the world;” a verdict not without justification, but bordering on those facile abstractions of criticism wherein the sense of comparative excellence is apt to lose itself in the confusion of diverse methods in art. The picture now hangs with the masterpieces of Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt, in the Walker Art Gallery at Liverpool. Among the many friends of that period who gave sittings to the artist for the principal figures were Frederick Denison Maurice and Thomas Carlyle.