Work

Ford Madox Brown

Date: 1859 - 63

Materials: Oil on canvas; in original frame

Three major paintings

'Work' was one of three major paintings begun by Brown in 1852, all of which took many years to complete. 'The Last of England' and 'English Autumn Afternoon' were both finished in 1855, leaving Brown free to take up 'Work' again in 1856, as a commission for the Leeds collector Thomas Plint, who died before it could be finished. This canvas is now in Manchester City Art Gallery, the Birmingham version being a half-size replica painted for James Leathart of Newcastle, who also owned 'The Pretty Baa-Lambs' and Burne-Jones's 'The Merciful Knight'.

Heath St, Hampstead

The setting is Heath Street, Hampstead, Brown originally painting the background on the spot in the summer of 1852. The artist's own explanation of its details runs to five pages in the catalogue of his 1865 one-man exhibition, where it was the last and culminating item. F. G. Stephens gave the painting a rapturous review in the 'Athenaeum', calling it "in everyrespect remarkable . . . Brilliant, solid, sound, studied with extraordinary earnestness, elaborate and masterly, the vigour of Work will astonish those who do not know what the artist has done before". 

Rich & poor

Each character or group is of symbolic significance, from the "British excavator, or navvy . . . as the outward and visible of type of Work" to the gentleman and his daughter on horseback. "These are the rich, who have no need to work, - not at least for bread"; the painter R. B. Martineau modelled for the gentleman.

On the left is the curious figure of a flower-gatherer for botanists, a free spirit "who has never been taught to work", while in the centre is a beer-seller, described by the artist as "a specimen of town pluck and energy contrasted with country thews and sinews . . . in all matters of taste, vulgar as Birmingham can make him in the 19th century".

The brainworkers

Initially, Brown had placed a single male figure on the right, perhaps representing himself both as commentator and working artist, but he complied with Plint's request to add the portraits of Thomas Carlyle and the Reverend F. D. Maurice, a leading Christian Socialist. "These are the brainworkers, who, seeming to be idle, work, and are the cause of well-ordained work and happiness in others".