Manchester City Art Galleries

Work (1852-63) by Ford Madox Brown. This landmark painting took Brown 11 years to complete. It is a modern allegory of society and a literal rendition of Heath Street, Hampstead, London and exemplifies Brown's dedicated craftmanship and brilliant colouring. Ordinary people are depicted as heroes, without straying into sentimentality. Brown eventually made enough money from his paintings to buy a house in Fitzroy Square which became a lively rendezvous for artists and writers to meet, discuss ideas and gossip.

Manchester City Art Galleries

Detail from Work showing Thomas Carlyle and F.D. Maurice.

While Frith was generally conservative in his approach to the social order, Ford Madox Brown (1821-93) took a very different stance. Work was shown, not at the Royal Academy, but at a one-man exhibition in 1865 for which Brown wrote his own descriptive catalogue. In this, he made his socialist views explicit. He did not identify the two observers on the right, but it is well known that they are Thomas Carlyle and Frederick Denison Maurice, the latter the founder of Christian Socialism. Carlyle, an author who was widely read in Brown's circle, had used clothing, in his book Sartor Resartus(1834), as a metaphor for unjustified social distinctions:

Happy he who can look through the Clothes of a Man (the woollen, and fleshly, and official Bank-paper and state-paper Clothes) into the man himself; and discern, it may be, in this or the other dread Potentate, a more or less incompetent Digestive-apparatus; yet also an inscrutable venerable Mystery, in the meanest Tinker that sees with eyes!

It might be expected, therefore, that Brown's use of dress would be different from that of Frith. In Work, the dress of the rich is partially concealed, while the focus, and the sunlight, is on the clothing of the poor children and the navvies. In his catalogue he drew attention to the 'manly and picturesque costume' of the navvy--in the painting the details of rolled-up check shirt and corduroy trousers are carefully delineated. Both the main navvy and the beer-seller are depicted as taking pride in their clothing and accessories--the dress of the poor is shown as not merely utilitarian, or picturesque in the sense of ragged, but an object of care and attention. The beer-seller, for example, has a decorative detail of ballerinas on his shirt. Brown's friend Rossetti was struck by the labour Brown devoted to such details:

I am beginning to doubt more and more, I confess, whether that excessive elaboration is rightly bestowed on the materials of a modern subject… for instance the flowing waistcoat of a potboy on which Brown has lately been spending some weeks of his life.

le he was working on the painting shows an awareness of the importance of clothing in the lives of the poor. On December 30, 1855, he took his dress coat, trousers, waistcoat, and necktie, along with a silk cape and brooch belonging to his wife, to be pawned. This raised 10 shillings, one of which he gave to 'old Williams' who took the items to the pawn shop for him. He therefore had first-hand experience of the strategies so often employed by the poor to make ends meet in times of economic downturn or illness, and of the implications these strategies had for respectability and social opportunities. His wife was pregnant at the time, and presumably he was forced to decline potentially useful social engagements as long as his dress suit was in pawn. Later on, he recorded that his wife had bought an outfit for a 17-year old girl found on the streets by the artist Burne-Jones. This girl was found at 2 a.m. on a cold January night, 'scarce any clothes and starving, in spite of prostitution, after only 5 weeks of London life'. The outfit enabled her to go home to her parents in the country. Brown evidently knew how lack of clothing could make it impossible for the poor to raise themselves out of degrading occupations. There is little evidence of how he obtained the clothing shown on the figures in Work, but his normal practice was to paint from actual clothes--in most cases, presumably, they were the clothes his models turned up in. He did, however, record that he 'bought a very dirty old wideawake off the head of a man I met & went home & painted it'--this is the hat worn by the flower-seller on the left.

Manchester City Art Galleries

Detail from Work (1852-63).

In his catalogue, Brown stated that the dress worn by the ragged girl in the foreground of the painting, who is not more than 10 years old, a 'poor child' who is worn-looking and thin, is 'evidently the compassionate gift of some grown-up person' which 'she has neither the art nor the means to adapt to her own diminutive proportions.' This prominent figure is somewhat ambiguous, however--while Brown seems to have thought of her function as stimulating compassion, her exposed neck and shoulders have voyeuristic overtones. Her dress reveals, rather than concealing her developing body, hinting at the woman she will become. Brown recorded that he 'growled with delight' when he painted her.

In contrast to the rags of the destitute poor are the clothes of the fashionable rich, the 'beauteous tripping dame with bell-like skirts', the 'lady whose only business in life as yet is to dress and look beautiful for our benefit' and the gentleman who 'is not an over-dressed man of the tailor's dummy sort--he does not put his fortune on his back, he is too rich for that.' All these comments, from Brown's catalogue, indicate his disdain for the interest of the wealthy in fine clothing--which he probably regarded in the same light as the pastry-cook's tray, a symbol of superfluity. His heroes, the thinkers on the right, wear clothing that is understated, and well-worn. Clothing is depicted in a way that indicates a belief in basic equality. Carlyle wears brown corduroy trousers that look very similar to those of the navvy, and a wideawake hat that is the same basic design as that of the flower-seller. Details of physiognomy, similarly, do not necessarily conform to the stereotypes--the navvy's forehead is as well developed as that of the 'thinker,' F.D. Maurice.