Forms That Work and Beg

No painting has ever worked as hard as Ford Maddox Brown's painting Work (1852-65) (figure 1). It took more than a decade to complete and Brown even recorded the number of hours he spent each day filling in piecemeal the overcrowded picture of laborers (called "navvies") building a water main in Hampstead, and of everything else besides. There is a beer seller, orange seller, and weed-gatherer; a boy delivers pastries in the margin on the left. In front of him, a woman hands out religious tracts and, in front of her, a pretty woman watches her little greyhound run toward the dusty lime the navvy shovels through a sieve. A gentleman and his daughter ride on horse back in the middle distance but, because the road is blocked, the daughter looks back for a way to avoid the work ahead. Street urchins and stray dogs squeeze into gaps at the bottom of a slope where the figures are so tightly stacked it seems hard to breathe. On the shaded bank beneath the highroad, unemployed haymakers take naps and an Irishman and his wife feed their baby cold mush. We know the mush is cold because Brown says it is in his gloss on the iconography of the painting. Against the railing, Thomas Carlyle stands to the left of F.D. Maurice, a Christian Socialist who founded the Working Men's College and also believed in the redemptive power of work. Men with orange signs campaign in the distance for "Bobus," a sausage-maker in Carlyle's Past and Present (1843) who gets rich by adulterating sausages with horse meat and then runs for office. You can read about this, too, in Brown's gloss.

Figure 1.

Ford Madox Brown, Work, 1852-1865. Oil on canvas. Manchester City Art Gallery.

Work is dedicated to the saving idea of work and comes with an accompanying sonnet and apostrophe to "Work!"—but not all the figures work in it. By this I mean not just how the idlers, criminals, and bums compare with the navvies, whose labor is as purifying as the water they will pump through the mains in Hampstead. I gather the gentleman is an idler here, too, nothing but an ornament at the apex of the social picture. The figures don't work because they are redundant in all the ways the picture cannot accommodate them within its congested field. There are many figures raised up for our attention, but none with an overriding claim to it, and there is no reason to think they all belong because Brown doesn't deliver the painting whole in any way. Everything that is pressed together also clashes badly in a garish variety of colors—reds, lemon yellows, ochres, blues, greens, browns—without any harmonizing hue. The painting is impossible to read at a distance and looking closely puts its parts into focus at the expense of a larger design. It is hard to take in the picture without filtering much of it out. The crushed content diminishes the recession from foreground to background, creating an overlapping effect that lacks an integrating perspective. Also, without breathing room, the picture is nauseating. The critic Andrew Graham-Dixon describes the "frenzied concatenation of hallucinatory detail: a sunburned arm; a gash under a man's eye; a baby with a face like a goblin's" as having the opposite of meaning.¹ What counts in the picture and what is wasted labor? Does anything depend on the white wheelbarrow painted in the corner with scrupulous care?

But let's try to focus on the sieve across the bottom from the wheelbarrow. We should be able to get at least something out of a sieve. The sieve that is sifting the lime is the symbol if there ever was one of the work we do to sort through the dross in a Victorian society picture about redundancy and value. As a symbol, it is also fitting for a picture that has trouble holding its contents within its frame, since the essence of the...