A visual interlude

Ford Madox Brown was one of the Pre-Raphaelite painters who brought great detail and accuracy into their works, exploring scenes from history, mythology or daily life in Victorian Britain.

‘Work’ is a complex painting Brown created over a 13 year period, depicting a group of “navvies” digging up a street near his studio in Hampstead.  Surrounding them is a variety of other characters, typical of London during the 1850s, who illustrate widely different relationships with respect to work.

The navvies are heroic characters, working to create the infrastructure of modern Britain.  Here they are installing piped water to the houses of north London for the first time, an advance which would reduce the incidence of both cholera and alcoholism. 

On the right of the scene are two men observing the manual work and conversing together.  Brown sees the philosopher and the clergyman as “brain workers”, who improve the lot of others through the power of their thinking and teaching.  He modelled these two on Thomas Carlyle, whose book “Then and Now” inspired the painting, and Revd Maurice, who founded a college for working men where Brown used to teach.

Below and behind them are people out of work – haymakers in search of a harvest, Irish immigrants displaced by the potato famine, and other itinerant agricultural labourers.  As they shelter from the heat of the July sun, their lack of significance in the painting reflects their apparent worthlessness in real life. 

   

Then there are those who do not need to work for a living: a gentleman and his daughter out for a morning ride, who find their path inconveniently blocked; a lady with a blue parasol on the left, concerned with keeping in fashion and ensuring her greyhound’s red jacket stays clean; another middle class woman behind her is distributing tracts for the temperance society. 

By placing the gaggle of children and the ragged chickweed seller in the foreground, the artist emphasises the destitute who cannot work, or who lack supportive relationships, and depend on their wits and the charity of others to survive in a cruel world.

Brown’s decision to crowd so many characters of widely differing wealth and status into one scene – in close relational proximity – reflects his strong social conscience.   

As true now as it was then, material wealth has to be created and stewarded, involving strength and wisdom and good judgment.  But those attributes alone do not make a society great; that depends also on a society’s ability to care for and include those who cannot work due to age, illness or lack of education or opportunity – in a way that is both compassionate and just.  As recession, unemployment and reduced welfare budgets loom large, we would do well to contemplate Ford Madox Brown’s perspective on the world.

(You can explore the painting further by visiting the Manchester Art Gallery’s dedicated section on ‘Work’.)