Work (painting)

Infobox Painting

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backcolor=#FBF5DF
painting_alignment=right
image_size=350px
title=Work
artist=Ford Madox Brown
year=1865
type=Oil on canvas
height_inch=53.9
width_inch=77.9
city=Manchester, England
museum=Manchester City Art Gallery

"Work" (1852-1865) is a painting by Ford Madox Brown, which is generally considered to be his most important work. It attempts to portray, both literally and analytically, the totality of the Victorian social system and the transition from a rural to an urban economy. Brown began the painting in 1852 and completed it in 1865, when he set up a special exhibition to showcase it along with several of his other works. He wrote a detailed catalogue explaining the significance of the picture.

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The picture depicts a group of so-called "Navvies" digging up the road to build a system of underground tunnels. It is typically assumed that these were part of the extensions of London's sewerage system, which were being undertaken to deal with the threat of typhus and cholera. The workers are in the centre of the painting. On either side of them are individuals who are either unemployed or represent the leisured classes. Behind the workers are two aristocrats on horseback, whose progress along the road has been halted by the excavations. [Biome, Albert, "Ford Madox Brown Carlyle, and Karl Marx: Meaning and Mystification of Work in the Nineteenth Century," Arts Magazine, September 1981]

The painting also portrays an election campaign, evidenced by posters and people carrying sandwich boards with the name of the candidate "Bobus". A poster also draws attention to the potential presence of a burglar. [Curtis, Gerald, "Ford Madox Brown's Work: An Iconographic Analysis", "The Art Bulletin", Vol. 74, No. 4 (Dec., 1992), pp. 623-636]

Background and influences

as the epitome of a corrupt businessman who uses his money to market himself as a politician.

Brown's principal artistic model was the work of William Hogarth, in particular his paintings Humours of an Election and his prints Beer Street and Gin Lane. The Election paintings depicted both the vitality and the corruption of British society, while the prints set up a contrast between poverty and prosperity. While working on the painting Brown founded the Hogarth club to link artists who saw themselves as Hogarth's admirers and followers.

, with its intense concentration on the complication of the pictorial surface in conflicting details. This image of potentially violent and jarring confrontation is set in opposition to the social harmony and deference epitomised by the picturesque tradition.

Characters and action

Workers

into a sieve. The fine powder accumulates in a pile on the left. [Brown, F.M., "Description of Work and other paintings", Nature and Industrialisaton, pp.316-20]

". All these figures are passing by the workers through a narrow pathway which brings them up against the sifted lime powder, a corrossive which symbolises the cleansing assault on their complacent rejection of useful work. [Brown, F.M., "Description of Work and other paintings", Nature and Industrialisaton, pp.316-20]

. [Brown, F.M., "Description of Work and other paintings", Nature and Industrialisaton, pp.316-20]

- speaking "to" his fictional fashionable lady about the perilous situation of the impoverished children. [Brown, F.M., "Description of Work and other paintings", Nature and Industrialisaton, pp.316-20]

wrapped in protective rope hangs over the railing that separates the productive from the unproductive figures in the composition. The Irish couple by the tree are feeding their baby with gruel, while an older man stands by the tree looking resentful. This aspect of the painting recalls Carlyle's discussion of unemployed Irish migrants in his book "Past and Present".

Beneath these figures on the road children can be seen playing, while genteel couples and sandwich-board carriers wander through the sun-dappled lower street. At the extreme right a policeman pushes a female orange seller who is resting her basket on a bollard (technically illegal, because she is setting up shop).

Intellectuals

" economic system and political corruption. He was known for his so-called "gospel of work", which described work as a form of worship. He wrote in "Past and Present",

It has been written, 'an endless significance lies in Work;' a man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seedfields rise instead, and stately cities; and withal the man himself first ceases to be a jungle and foul unwholesome desert thereby. Consider how, even in the meanest sorts of Labour, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony, the instant he sets himself to work! Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, Despair itself, all these like helldogs lie beleaguering the soul of the poor dayworker, as of every man: but he bends himself with free valour against his task, and all these are stilled, all these shrink murmuring far off into their caves. The man is now a man. The blessed glow of Labour in him, is it not as purifying fire, wherein all poison is burnt up, and of sour smoke itself there is made bright blessed flame! [ [http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=i&p=c&a=p&ID=24098&c=513 Past and Present, Chapter XI, Labour] . See also, Frederick Engels, Review of Carlyle's Past and Present, 1844, Engles, "Collected Works", Christopher Upward, trans.]

In the same book Carlyle creates the character of Bobus Higgins, a corrupt sausage maker who uses horsemeat in his product to undercut competitors. [ [http://www.online-literature.com/thomas-carlyle/past-and-present/5/ Past and Preesent, Chapter 5] ] In "Latter-Day Pamphlets" Bobus is portrayed as a populist manipulator who is going into politics. [ [http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/carlyle/hudson/flynn2.html Practical Politics in "Hudson's Statue", Paul Flynn English/Religious Studies 256, "Sacred Readings" (2004), Brown University] ] In the painting his agent appears behind Carlyle's head, prodding local "idlers" to walk through the streets carrying signs with his name on them. At the left a "Vote for Bobus" poster has been hit by a ball of mud or faeces and has "don't" chalked onto it.

Composition and significance

The painting is structured by the increasing compression of space from right to left, as the rural relaxation on the right side is replaced by the concentrated labour in the middle and the urban crush on the far left. The workers in the centre break up the established relationship between the characters, throwing people together in new ways. Brown reproduces the common triangular structure of the social system, with the horse-riding aristocrats at the top. But they are pushed to the back, stuck and unable to progress — forced into the shade in the background, while the workers occupy the brightly lit foreground. The railings around the excavations separate the realm of productive work from that of leisure, lassitude and unproductive work.

As with most Pre-Raphaelite paintings the composition minimises chiaroscuro and accummulates motifs in deliberately confusing abundance, containing numerous Hogarthian sub-episodes within the main image (a man washing windows; a dog worrying horses leading a carriage etc). The composition is also used to dramatically crop figures and motifs which complicates the legibility of space (the hand emerging from the hole; the cropped figures behind the intellectuals' head). Carlyle's smile links the viewer in a paradoxical engagement with the re-working process depicted. [Trodd, C, "Ford Madox Brown's Work", Harding, E, "Reframing the Pre-Raphaelites", Scolar, 1996]

Notes