Work
Work, the most elaborate and best-known painting by English artist Ford Madox Brown, created between 1852 and 1865. Brown provided inspiration for the young artists who founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and, in turn, was influenced by their ideals. This painting demonstrates his close links with the movement.
Initially at least, the Pre-Raphaelites wanted to paint scenes of modern life that were true to nature, as well as morally improving. Brown’s picture accords well with these aims. On one level, it portrays workers installing the new sewerage system on Heath Street in Hampstead, in north London; on another, it is a parable about the value of labor. In addition, it delineates the stratification of Victorian society. For modern commentators, the painting is remarkable for the freshness and originality of its composition and as a detailed document of Victorian social life.
Work was commissioned by the collector T.E. Plint, though he died before the painting was completed. Ironically, its reputation has been slightly undermined by the artist’s exhaustive explanations about its symbolism. The central focus is on the heroic navvies, or unskilled laborers, digging up the road for the placement of sewers. Equally important to the meaning of the scene are the two men standing in the lower right corner—the writer and philosopher Thomas Carlyle and the Christian Socialist Frederick Denison Maurice, the founder of the Working Men’s College. Behind the workers, at the top of the composition, a wealthy pair on horseback find their progress blocked by the sewer project. Traversing a narrow walkway to the left are a lady in a purple bonnet distributing religious tracts, an elegant lady carrying a parasol, and a barefoot man in tatters selling chickweed, described by the artist as someone who has not been taught to work. To the right of the tunnel being dug are beer sellers and a man draining a bucket of beer. Below the workers are a group of destitute and orphaned children, the oldest in a dress far too big for her, carrying a baby that wears a black band on its arm, signifying bereavement, and reaching out to control a young boy to her right, while a smaller girl sucks on a carrot. In a gully, a barefoot family sits under a tree, and rural laborers nap in the sunlight. Political posters adorn the brick wall on the left, while on the lower road people wear sandwich boards urging votes for Bobus, a fictional corrupt sausage-maker in a book by Carlyle.
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