Sweat, struggle, survival: Capturing the endeavour of industry on canvas

That all-too-familiar nine-to-five feeling goes back to the beginning of human civilisation; as far back as the expulsion from Eden, if Genesis is to be believed.

Jehovah’s words to Adam after the Fall — ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground’ — are the basis for the traditional belief that work is both a lifelong curse and a destiny imposed by God. For many centuries, artists who depicted workmen would probably have had Adam with his spade and Eve with her spinning wheel at the backs of their mind — but when did work come in itself to be regarded as a fit subject for art? Scenes of working life form a background to events in the Christian narrative, from the shepherds tending their flocks at the Nativity to Jesus summoning fishermen on the Sea of Galilee to be his apostles. However, it was not until the later Middle Ages that artists focused on working people without any reference to a larger narrative.

Christians were helped to remember the dates of the feast days of the liturgical year by the inclusion of calendar pages in their devotional books. From late antiquity onwards, these were often embellished with the signs of the zodiac to mark the passage of the year. By the 12th century, it began to be common for the signs to be linked to the labours of the months — in March, Aries was accompanied by a scene of people pruning and July saw Leo paired with labourers reaping corn.

By the beginning of the 15th century, most famously in the illuminations to the great Netherlandish manuscript known as the Très Riches Heures, made for Jean, duc de Berry, these scenes were developed into detailed depictions of contemporary men and women at work in carefully observed landscapes.

The labours were almost exclusively agricultural in nature, partly because they were tied to the seasons set out in the calendars, but also because for most people in medieval Europe work meant labour on the land. It is not surprising, therefore, that scenes of ordinary people at work first became a genre in its own right, divorced from the liturgical calendar, in the urban setting of the towns and cities of the Protestant Netherlands.

A fashion developed in mid-17th-century Dutch art for sets of portraits of craftsmen — idealised figures, rather than portraits — such as knife grinders, blacksmiths and barbers, which may perhaps reflect the increasingly rigid organisation of such trades into guilds. These figures were so popular that some painters began to specialise in scenes of workshops. Among them was the Leiden artist Quiringh van Brekelenkam (about 1622 – about 1669), who in such typical works as The Cobbler shows a well-ordered, but not obviously idealised room that doubles as a workshop and domestic space, with a client leaning through the window, perhaps waiting for the cobbler to finish mending his shoe, as the latter’s wife prepares the day’s meal.

The popularity of such works encouraged people to look at real workmen with more appreciative eyes. A century later, in the mid 1760s, George Byng, Viscount Torrington, was watching bricklayers at work on his Southill estate in Bedfordshire when he was struck by their resemblance to ‘a Flemish subject’ — he almost certainly had Dutch paintings in mind. He commissioned George Stubbs (1724–1806) to paint a set of three canvases depicting his employees working at Southill, including grooms and a gamekeeper, as well as labourers. He chose his artist well, as Stubbs was a masterly painter of rural labour, most famously in his pair of canvases Haymakers and Reapers, made in 1785 and both now at Tate Britain.

There was a vogue for scenes of agricultural labour in mid-Georgian Britain, stimulated in part by the immense popularity of James Thomson’s series of four poems The Seasons (1726–30). Although the paintings are idealised — Stubbs conveys little sense of sweat or muscular exhaustion — the impression they give of a contented hierarchical society also honours the workmen and women who provide its food. The well-dressed figures, notably the standing woman in Haymakers boldly facing us with her rake, are individuals and, although anonymous, must surely be based on life studies.

Stubbs’s golden vision of the labourer’s place in a well-ordered society that seems to have changed little since the days of the medieval calendars was upended only four years later by revolution in France. The abolition of the monarchy, aristocracy and clergy and the elevation of the ordinary working man to the pinnacle of the social hierarchy — in ideological terms, at least — had a major impact on artists.

French painters were the first who sought to celebrate in a realistic way the new status of manual labour. The most influential artist in this radical genre was Jean-François Millet (1814–75). It is hard now to grasp how disconcerting many contemporaries found such works as The Wood Sawyers (1850–52), where the dominant figure is a man whose straining thighs and buttocks are thrust out towards the viewer. To many critics, such paintings were unpalatably coarse in their lack of idealisation, but others — most famously Vincent van Gogh — admired the heroic monumentality of Millet’s depictions of manual toil.

Perhaps the best-known 19th-century celebration of such labour is, however, English. In 1852, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown (1821–93) began work on a painting of navvies digging a trench for water pipes in Hampstead. He took 11 years to complete it — a great labour in itself — before exhibiting it in 1865 under the title Work. The simplicity of the name was complicated by the Biblical texts Brown inscribed on the frame, which include the lines from Genesis with which this article began.

The central figure, described by Brown as ‘the young navvy in the pride of manly health and beauty’, is posed with the authority of a classical statue and although Brown wrote that he set the scene in July to emphasise the toil of working outdoors in the heat, the golden light that bathes the workmen might also signify divine favour. Scenes of manual labour were often celebrations of heroic masculinity, a quality that Brown emphasises by contrasting the powerful figures of the navvies with the slatternly girl in the foreground and the effeminate flower seller, who slinks along the wall at the far left.

By the time that Brown’s painting was first shown in public, an increasing number of workers saw little of the sun during their working day as they were confined to factories. In 1872, the Prussian artist Adolph Menzel (1815–1905) conceived the idea of a monumental canvas depicting an iron-rolling mill, which he based on detailed studies of ironworks at Königshütte in Upper Silesia, now in Poland. Shown at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, France, in 1878, it has been acclaimed as the first great factory scene in European art.

In fact, there were precedents — an English viewer might think of Joseph Wright of Derby’s industrial forges or William Bell Scott’s Iron and Coal: The Nineteenth Century, a mural at Wallington Hall, Northumberland, painted in 1861. Menzel was, however, one of the first painters to convey the terrifying scale of 19th-century industry, to which he gave a nationalist twist. Previously best known for canvases on the life of Frederick the Great, he recognised that Prussian industrial achievements honoured the Hohenzollerns no less than scenes of historic military triumphs.

Although Menzel shows the workers as almost overwhelmed by the scale of their setting, they are recognisably the same sort of heroic men that Millet and Brown depicted. Women, who traditionally were painted at work only in their homes or in the fields, had to wait until the 20th century before they, too, were represented in scenes of industrial labour, a change that owed as much to war as it did to feminism.

During the Second World War, Laura Knight (1877–1970), until then best known for ballet and circus scenes, was employed by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, an association that led to her becoming Britain’s official artist at the Nuremberg trials. Her most celebrated wartime canvas is Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-Ring, painted in 1943, which shows Loftus at work on a lathe in the Royal Ordnance factory in Newport, Wales, demonstrating her mastery of the highly technical skill of making a breech ring for a Bofors anti-aircraft gun. Knight matched the precision of Loftus’s task with the careful detail of the portrait, which was praised for its accurate depiction of the manufacturing process. Her experience with dancers must have prepared her for the task of painting a figure engaged in complex manual labour.

Compared with men working with muscular energy or women in control of delicate machinery, the offices in which most people work today offer much less interesting material for artists. This very lack of excitement was perhaps what drew Edward Hopper (1882–1967) to paint Office at Night in 1940, during a period when he was producing his best-known scenes of urban loneliness, such as Nighthawks (1942).

As so often in Hopper’s art, one wonders if there is an unrevealed narrative behind the figures of the man at his desk and the woman standing at a filing cabinet, but perhaps they are simply a modern Adam and Eve, pondering God’s condemnation of humanity to eternal labour.

This article first appeared in the January 28 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.