Work

Ford Madox Brown began 'Work' in 1852 and labored on it until 1865, producing what is perhaps the most ambitious and intellectually complex statement of Victorian social values in the entire history of painting. The subject — navvies digging a water main in the London suburb of Hampstead — becomes a meditation on the moral, social, and economic meaning of labor in industrial Britain. Brown populated the scene with figures representing every stratum of Victorian society: the laboring navvies at the center who embody physical productive work; idlers and the unemployed at the margins; a rich woman on horseback; barefoot children; a flower-seller; and at the right edge, two observers understood to be the Christian socialist theologian F.D. Maurice and the social critic Thomas Carlyle, whose writings on the sanctity of labor informed the painting's program. The Birmingham Museums Trust's collection of this major work makes it one of the most significant Victorian paintings in civic hands.

The exceptionally large canvas required Brown to develop compositional strategies for organizing an enormous quantity of individualized figures in complex spatial relationships. Each figure was painted from a specific model, and the outdoor setting — bright Hampstead sunlight — required the management of intense directional light across more than a dozen figures and as much supporting detail. The white-ground technique and microscopic attention to surface detail create a visual density that rewards extended examination.