The Reworking of Work

F OR THE EXHIBITION of his collected works at the Burleigh Gallery in London during the spring of 1865, Ford Madox Brown supplied a lengthy descriptive catalogue which gave highly detailed accounts of many of the paintings on display. Rarely before had a painter offered such an insight into his artistic methods and intentions, and the reviewers of the day were suitably impressed; the Pre-Raphaelite critic William Michael Rossetti even went so far as to remark that if others were to follow Brown’s practice, “it would enable the spectator to know for certain exactly what the artist meant, and what his work means, and would thus cut short a deal of silly and often perverse guess-work” (Rossetti, 1970: 181). The centerpiece of the show was a highly detailed canvas called Work (Figure 8) which had taken the artist over ten years to complete. In his review for Fraser’s Magazine Rossetti commented that the artist’s account of this painting was particularly valuable, since it enabled one “to follow out the whole scheme of thought into its details with certainty instead of by guess,” so that one gradually came to realise that “not a corner of the picture, a figure, or an action, is without its close yet varied relation to the central idea” (1970: 182). And indeed, Brown’s catalogue description did give a remarkably full account of its development, recording its transformation from a comparatively modest genre painting into a large-scale celebration of modern labor

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