Work
Ford Madox Brown's Painting and Victorian Life
by John A Walker
Francis Boutle Publishers
ISBN 1 903427 29 0
Paperback 138 pages
33 illustrations in black and white and 19 in full colour
Price per copy including postage: UK £20.00 Worldwide £22.00
The book
Ford Madox Brown’s fascinating realist painting Work takes as its heroes a group of labourers laying water pipes in The Mount, Hampstead. They are surrounded by a variety of picturesque characters representing the different classes and occupations of Victorian society, including two intellectuals – Thomas Carlyle and the Rev F. D. Maurice, whose ideas are crucial to the painting’s meaning.
This fully illustrated book tells the story behind Brown’s masterpiece – its sources in popular art, its composition and its ‘message’, as well as its critical reception at the time and its impact on art in the twentieth century.
Walker also examines the history of Hampstead in the 1850s, the wider issues of conflict and ideas in Victorian Britain and the social history of London with its cast of navvies, urchins and street vendors, philosophers, reformers and idlers.
The author
John A. Walker, art critic and art historian, trained as a painter at Newcastle upon Tyne. Until his retirement in 1999 he was Reader in Art & Design History at Middlesex University. He is the author of more than fifteen books, mostly concerned with the relationship between fine art and the mass media; they include Art in the Age of Mass Media, Design History and the History of Design, Art and Outrage, Firefighters in Art and Media, and a study of the British artist John Latham.
