Work (painting)

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Work

Ford Madox Brown, 1865

Oil on canvas

Manchester City Art Gallery, Manchester, England

Work (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 sicial system and the trasition 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.

[edit] Subject

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 hoseback, whose progress along the road has been halted by the excavations. The painting also portrays an election campaign, evidenced by posters and people carrying sandwich boards with the name of the candidate "Bobus".

[edit] Background

Brown explained that he had intended to demonstrate that the modern British workman could be as fit a subject for art as the more supposedly picturesque Italian "lazarone". He set the painting on Heath Street in Hampstead, of which he made a detailed study. Hampstead was at the time a wealthy area on the outskirts of London, which was undergoing rapid expansion. The developmnt of the new sewerage and drainage systems in the city was also widely discussed in the press as an agent of modernisation. The character of "Bobus" appears in the writings of Thomas Carlyle as the epitome of a corrupt businessman who uses his money to market himself as a politician.

[edit] Notes